Rebuilding Labor Power in the Postindustrial United States

Setting the Stage: The Decline of the New Deal Model of Industrial and Labor Relations

The problem in the U.S. labor market lies less in the quantity than the quality and distribution of jobs. There are not enough good jobs. The poverty rate is three times the unemployment rate. And a vastly disproportionate share of the good jobs that are available are held by white, male workers who are fortunate enough to be well educated—leaving women, minorities, and the less educated at risk of both mind-numbing labor and occasional or ongoing poverty (Sauter 2018; Thrush 2018).

The problem is in large part the product of a vicious circle: absent bargaining power, workers cannot do much to improve their situations; and in their current situation, workers tend to lack bargaining power (Sussman 2016; Krueger 2018). Survey data suggest that at least half of all workers report a gap between their desired and actual levels of input into their “benefits, compensation, promotion, job security, technological change, and protections against harassment” (Kochan et al. 2019, 14), for example, and that almost half of all nonunionized workers would vote for a union if given the opportunity—a sharp uptick from prior surveys (Kochan et al. 2019, 20). But the best-known solutions to the voice gap—for example, repealing the Taft-Hartley Amendments to the Wagner Act, or adopting the Employee Free Choice Act, in an effort to eliminate barriers to union certification that undermined the New Deal equilibrium—seem politically unrealistic and economically naïve in today’s decentralized, volatile global economy.

After all, the New Deal system went from strength to strength. Mass production allowed unskilled workers to consolidate their power at the proverbial point of production. Industrial unions translated their efforts into collective bargaining contracts and progressive reform. Productivity gains allowed industrial enterprises to comply with the contracts and reforms that the unions had extracted at relatively low cost. And the whole system could be overseen by specialized agencies (e.g., the National Labor Relations Board, the Wage and Hour Division of the Department of Labor, and later the Occupational Safety and Health Administration [OSHA] and Equal Employment Opportunities Commission), which could plan their regulatory efforts in a relatively stable macroeconomic environment; and enforcement personnel, who reaped economies of scale by covering thousands of at least nominally homogeneous workers every time they entered the field, entered a judgment, or made a ruling (Piore and Schrank 2018).

In other words, the scale economies that made modern factories profitable also left them vulnerable. Unions could organize tens of thousands of workers in a single campaign. Regulators could address their needs in a single factory visit. Judges could defend their rights with a single ruling. And companies could lose more than they had to gain by resisting organization and regulation—at least in the short run.

The system did not produce Shangri La. There were differences in pay and status within the factories and unions. They were often racialized and gendered (see, e.g., Greer 1976). And unorganized workers, who were disproportionately female and/or minority, were relegated to second-class citizenship (Piore 1980, 404).

The problem with the New Deal system, however, was not just that it was inequitable but that it was unsustainable. Employers who wanted to escape the clutches of the system had several options available, including divide-and-conquer strategies made possible by the very inequalities that the system had aggravated, hard bargaining by oligopolies in tight northern labor markets, and the retreat to the South—where the Wagner Act had been diluted, if not necessarily defanged, by “right-to-work” campaigns and the like even before the passage of Taft-Harley (see, e.g., Cowie 1999; Gross 2011; Lichtenstein 2011).

These problems would in all likelihood be aggravated today, moreover, by deindustrialization, the deceleration of productivity growth, and the decentralization of production—which together raise the costs and undercut the efficiency of specialized enforcement agencies. After all, the specialized enforcement personnel who oversaw the New Deal system were costly and inflexible, but the demand for their specialized services was relatively predictable in the Bretton Woods era, and they reaped a large return on the government’s investment by addressing the needs of hundreds—or perhaps thousands—of workers each time they entered a factory or entered a judgment. When their descendants enter a workplace or a judgment today, however, they cover a few workers or overlook countless violations that fall outside their jurisdictions but are sitting under their noses, thus leaving money lying on the table (Piore and Schrank 2018).

The decentralization of employment poses a similar challenge to collective bargaining. Unions still win most elections that occur under the National Labor Relations Act (i.e., the Wagner Act); however, the elections themselves tend to occur in smaller bargaining units, meaning that organizers and administrators are running to stay in place independently of the better-known hurdles imposed by employer opposition (Compa 2016, 23).

Positive policy feedbacks have thus turned negative for workers and their families in the United States. Today’s wage-earners are too diffuse, diverse, and precarious to be organized and protected by traditional institutions, which were designed for a homogeneous, stable, and centralized workforce; and in the absence of organization and protection they will grow ever more diffuse, vulnerable, and precarious.

Consider, for example, the differences between large employers in the mid-twentieth century, when industrial giants like General Motors, General Electric, and U.S. Steel employed tens of thousands of relatively homogeneous workers in stand-alone plants (Freeman 2018); and today, when cities across the country are competing for Amazon fulfillment centers that employ an average of 1,700 heterogeneous workers (Steiner 2017), retail outlets like Wal-Mart and Costco are considered large establishments with even fewer employees, and both brick-and-mortar retailers and their online competitors are selling products made in factories overseas—and demanding public subsidies to do so.

Sparrows Point in Baltimore offers an evocative example. The Bethlehem Steel mill there once employed more than thirty thousand members of the United Steelworkers Union (Henry 2002; see also Reutter 2004, 397); but it closed in 2012 and is currently being redeveloped into a logistics hub with a host of heavily subsidized tenants ranging from Amazon, with a target of fifteen hundred workers, to smaller retailers and restaurants with just a few workers (Simmons 2016; Wood 2018a, 2018b).

Organizing these workers would be incredibly costly. Bargaining contracts and filing grievances on their behalves would be more so. And enforcing their legal protections would be an inefficient nightmare—with understaffed, specialized agencies such as OSHA and the Wage and Hour Division (WHD) of the Department of Labor making separate trips to the same establishment on different days at great expense. Where union representatives or regulatory agents could address the needs of tens of thousands of workers a day in the 1950s, they would cover a few hundred on a very good day in the current climate. On a bad day, they would find that their targets had shut their doors or reopened down the block under a different name (Levine 2018).

Unions, regulators, and labor lawyers are effectively fighting a twenty-first-century war with twentieth-century weapons. The war is a campaign against small, decentralized employers in highly competitive industries who have both an incentive and the ability to cut corners as well as costs, in part by exploiting workers who are vulnerable to division and abuse. The weapons are high-cost, specialized bureaucracies that presuppose scale economies and stability that no longer exist.

It is no wonder, therefore, that the United States faces an epidemic of labor and employment law violations. Survey data suggest that more than a quarter of all low-wage workers in the country’s largest cities are paid less than the legally mandated minimum wage (Bernhardt, Spiller, and Theodore 2013; Galvin 2016). Overtime violations are rampant. We have one of the highest rates of occupational fatality—not to mention the highest rate of child labor—among the high-income members of the OECD. Union activists are threatened and intimidated with near impunity (Piore and Schrank 2018). And employment discrimination is so widespread that members of minority groups—African American men in particular—have trouble finding jobs, let alone good jobs, in the first place (Pager and Western 2012). The nontraditional campaigns pursued by alt-labor are therefore long overdue and well-suited to the times.

Beyond the New Deal Model: The Rise of Alt-Labor

Alternatives to industrial unions are not, however, emerging in a political vacuum. On the contrary, they presuppose and propel political action including movement building, advocacy, litigation, and lobbying on behalf of reforms designed to help low-wage workers (Lee 2016, 524). What most clearly differentiates alt-labor from traditional labor, therefore, is less an aversion to politics or public authority per se than a tendency to pursue political as well as shop-floor action flexibly and opportunistically. Where traditional unions performed a relatively narrow range of tasks for a large—and largely homogeneous—workforce, and thus exploited economies of scale, alt-labor groups pursue a variety of goals with a diverse array of workers (Gottheil 2014, 2248–52; Hirsch and Seiner 2018, 1779), and thus pursue economies of scope. ¹ One observer goes so far as to compare them to new economy start-ups that “try a lot of things, fail fast, and when things work, lean-in” (Weissbourd 2018, 12–13); she goes on to draw a contrast between “lean” labor organizations and “traditional unions” that are more focused and less flexible. Examples of the former would include the aforementioned “worker centers,” which “provide services and advocate on behalf of nonunion workers” (Hirsch and Seiner 2018, 1748); law firms and legal advocacy groups that take labor and employment cases on behalf of low-wage workers in particular (Quigley 2016); organizations that defend workers with distinct jobs (e.g., day laborers, taxi drivers) or identities (e.g., immigrants); and alliances of different groups or stakeholders in the alt-labor community (see, e.g., Steinkopf-Frank 2019).

Organizations like these could lay the foundation for a new model of labor and employment relations. But to do so they will have to go from strength to strength, just as industrial unions did in the mid-twentieth century—when victories helped the movement to grow, and growth helped the movement to achieve more victories. In other words, alt-labor would have to foster increasing returns through “positive feedback” loops (Pierson 2000) that are arguably more difficult to build and sustain in today’s polarized, cynical, and austere environment than in an era of Democratic hegemony based in part on white male hegemony in the North and, all the more so, the South (Hacker and Pierson 2018; see also Cowie 2011).

One finds pockets of positive feedback like this in alt-labor. Consider, for example, the Working Hands Legal Clinic (WHLC) in Chicago, which used regular legal work and referral fees to underwrite support for worker centers in the early twenty-first century—before eventually being absorbed into a larger alliance of alt-labor organizations. “In addition to direct representation services,” explains law professor Bill Quigley, “WHLC worked on policy issues related to employment in low-wage jobs and fights to remove barriers to low-wage workers exercising their rights and being paid for their work” (Quigley 2016; see also Bobo and Casillas Pabellón 2016, 271; Carrillo 2017, 101). The results included not only more extensive protections against wage and hour violations but rules that make fee-shifting between attorneys and alt-labor groups more straightforward. “In Chicago now,” explains the clinic’s founder, “it is pretty standard for law firms to share fees with such nonprofit organizations, including worker centers” (Williams quoted in Quigley 2016).

Examples like these speak to the possibility of postindustrial policy feedback. The lawsuits generate legal fees. The legal fees fund the lobbying. The lobbying shapes the legislation. The legislation makes more successful lawsuits possible. And the plaintiffs and policy advocates join forces and build power over time.

But WHLC is the exception to the rule. Most alt-labor organizations are trapped in a vicious circle of low funding and limited reach: in the absence of resources, they are unable to offer extensive services let alone policy advocacy; and without more legal and political victories, they are unable to raise funds that would support worker defense and reform campaigns. In many cases, moreover, they are dependent on foundation grants—and thus subject to onerous reporting requirements, at best, and capture by elite donors, at worst (Avins, Larcom, and Weissbourd 2018, 60; see also Compa 2015, 11).

To build the new economy, of course, start-ups had to break out of a similar circle. They could not develop viable products without capital, and they could not get capital without viable products. While private investors take much of the credit for turning the vicious circle into a virtuous one in places like Silicon Valley, federal agencies took the lead by offering start-ups and scientists seed funding and subsidies before venture capitalists and investment banks got involved (Schrank and Whitford 2009; Block and Keller 2011). The question, therefore, is whether the federal government could play a similar role for alt-labor, and the answer is likely to be found in the debate over the minimum wage.

Building a Wage Floor: F15, 911-4w, and Regulatory Rationalization

The so-called Fight for 15 (F15) campaign brought the possibility of a large-scale increase in the federal minimum wage to national attention for the first time in history. But the origins of F15 are controversial, and the campaign to “give America a raise” arguably predates the eponymous movement in any event, dating at least to the publication of David Card and Alan Krueger’s landmark study of the effects of the New Jersey minimum wage increase on employment in the state’s fast food industry in the early 1990s (Card and Krueger 1994). While mainstream theory predicted that employers in New Jersey would respond to the wage shock by laying off workers, Card and Krueger (1994) found that they actually hired more workers than their counterparts in neighboring Pennsylvania, where the lower federal minimum prevailed.

Other scholars have challenged Card and Krueger’s results to be sure (see, e.g., Neumark and Wascher 2000), but the “overwhelming weight of the evidence” (DeLong 2015; see also Schmitt 2013) supports their position; and doubts about the employment costs of minimum wage legislation have, if anything, grown further with the appearance of real-world experiments in cities and states across the country. More than half of the U.S. population now lives in a state or municipality that mandates a minimum wage higher than the federal standard of $7.25 an hour, and “by 2022, 17 percent of Americans will live in a city or state with a $15 minimum wage” (Gill 2018). Given that the $7.25 federal standard prevails in a number of key purple states (e.g., Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin), moreover, the issue could prove salient in the 2020 election.

Imposing a $15 minimum wage at the national level would have an array of normative and distributive advantages. Evidence suggests that the direct beneficiaries of minimum wage laws are disproportionately—if by no means exclusively—likely to be women and minorities who would experience rising wages, declining poverty, and less need (and perhaps eligibility) for public assistance programs such as food stamps (Reich, Jacobs, and Bernhardt 2014); that is, the very workers who were relegated to the periphery of the New Deal system. But the indirect beneficiaries would potentially include frustrated workers in different regions, classes, and communities who would rejoin the labor force as their expected earnings grew; taxpayers who would no longer have to bear the costs of social programs that in effect subsidize low-road employers; and vulnerable workers who would gain voice and bargaining power as their own costs of job loss declined.

The growth of voice is by no means obvious, however, for voluntarists on the Left have at times been as skeptical of minimum wages as radicals on the Right, albeit for different reasons. While conservatives worried that wage standards would destroy jobs by pricing labor out of the market, voluntarists worried that they would destroy voice by rendering collective bargaining unnecessary—and Samuel Gompers, the founding president of the American Federation of Labor, famously opposed a statutory minimum wage on the grounds that “the minimum tends to become the maximum” over time (Samuel 2000, 34).

Remnants of “Gompersian voluntarism” (Schlozman 2015, 8) are found among some champions of alt-labor. But history and scholarship have largely put paid to their views (Mishel and Walters 2003, 4), and contemporary experts therefore see the minimum wage and worker voice as complements rather than substitutes—if minimum wage laws are enforced.

In that respect, the F15 is being carried out at an ironic moment in American labor history. On one hand, there is a groundswell of support for a dramatic expansion in the federal minimum wage, and perhaps for worker protection more generally. On the other hand, public officials are having trouble enforcing labor and employment laws that are already on the books. Minimum wage violations are rampant. Enforcement personnel are in short supply. Cognate labor and employment laws are violated with near impunity. And unions are near extinction—especially in the private sector (Piore and Schrank 2018).

Part of the problem lies in the aforementioned mismatch between the regulatory system established during the New Deal (and bolstered by the Great Society) and the shape of the contemporary economy. The former was designed with mass production in mind. The modal worker was assumed to be a semiskilled white male who worked in a factory, belonged to a union, and relied on a collective bargaining contract overseen by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB); insofar as there were gaps in the system (e.g., nonunionized workers, African Americans, women), moreover, they would be filled by similarly specialized laws (e.g., the Fair Labor Standards Act in the 1930s and eventually Title VII of the Civil Rights Act) and agencies (e.g., WHD, OSHA, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission [EEOC]), but the latter would backstop rather than underpin the system as a whole.

In other words, the regulatory system that protected the factory labor force required no less specialization than the factory itself. The NLRB oversaw collective bargaining. The WHD took responsibility for wages and hours. And eventually OSHA and EEOC joined the mix, along with a host of smaller federal, state, and local agencies. ²

What this meant in practice was that the system as a whole presupposed stability and scale. Both the fixed costs of running that many agencies and the variable costs of dealing with their different targets (e.g., visiting firms, hearing testimony, making rulings, etc.) are enormous. If they are to reap a meaningful return on the government’s investment in their establishment and administration, therefore, these agencies have to make sure that their personnel either pursue economies of scale by reaching huge audiences with each visit, ruling, or decree, and do so on a near-constant basis; or pursue economies of scope by joining forces to defray upfront costs and reach the worst offenders who violate more than one law or regulation (GAO 1988). Otherwise, they are running up the down escalator.

Reaching huge audiences was broadly feasible in the industrial era, when inspectors could cover hundreds or perhaps thousands of workers with each factory visit; administrative agencies and courts could set precedents for millions of allegedly homogeneous workers with each decree or ruling; and a relatively stable macroeconomic environment allowed public officials to plan their campaigns accordingly (i.e., to maximize the utilization of case processing resources). But the organizational and spatial decentralization of production have conspired with automation to undermine these assumptions, leaving the existing enforcement agencies in limbo. Their targets are too small to permit economies of scale in case processing. Their jurisdictions are too narrow to allow them to compensate by pursuing economies of scope (i.e., covering more ground with each investigation, visit, or ruling). And their specialties are frequently ill-suited to a rapidly changing economy.

What is to be done about the decline of regulatory authority? The U.S. federal government is unlikely to merge OSHA, WHD, and EEOC, let alone to adopt the “one inspector(ate) per firm” approach recommended by the International Labour Organization (Piore and Schrank 2018), but improvements can be made at relatively low cost short of a complete overhaul by thinking about enforcement gaps from both the supply and the demand sides. On one hand, enforcement resources are in short supply. They are neither sufficient in number nor efficiently allocated. To take but one example, the average workplace will be visited by a wage and hour investigator no more than once every 50 years—and once there, the investigator will pay no attention to safety and health, employment discrimination, or union-busting, despite the fact that violations tend to travel in packs (Piore and Schrank 2018). On the other hand, the demand for redress is insufficient. Workers are not only scared to lose their jobs if they complain but unsure where to complain in the first place. “To which of the nine agencies listed on the bulletin board in the breakroom do I turn? And what happens if I do so?”

We could address the first problem by creating a national database of labor law violators and asking or compelling all enforcement agencies to contribute their data, much as U.S. police departments were pushed toward “data integration” (La Vigne et al. 2017, 6) in the aftermath of September 11 and the manufacturing extension centers funded by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) are compelled to contribute their data to NIST’s systems (Brandt, Schrank, and Whitford 2018). Employers who showed up repeatedly and/or violated multiple statutes could be flagged for additional screening, much like suspicious passengers in airports, and agencies might be given incentives to carry out joint investigations. Argentina has not only created a database of labor law violators but linked it to data on government subsidies and contracts, depriving firms on the former from access to the latter; the country has seen a rapid drop in informality and related forms of noncompliance. ³ The United States could easily do the same. ⁴

We could also boost the demand for redress by establishing and advertising an anonymous clearinghouse and telephone number for reports of workplace abuse. Rather than trying to figure out whether the mistreatment they had suffered was covered by one of the myriad notices on the bulletin board in the breakroom, workers could call a single number in search of the advice they needed, and their calls could be routed to the appropriate agency or agencies. Crime reports skyrocketed with the advent of the 911 emergency response system (Burnham 1996), and we could expect a similar spike following the introduction and advertisement of 911-4w; that is, a rapid response system for workplace abuse. If regulatory and enforcement agencies responded to the spike by carrying out joint investigations informed by their newly integrated data, moreover, they could compensate for the economies of scale (i.e., covering more workers per visit) that were lost with the breakdown of large-scale industrial employment by exploiting economies of scope (i.e., covering more violations per visit) in an era of concentrated violations (GAO 1988; Piore and Schrank 2018).

The conjunction of a higher minimum wage and improved enforcement would thus produce a new virtuous circle that would at least partly replace the one broken by the demise of the industrial economy. Workers would feel empowered and knowledgeable enough to exercise voice at the workplace; their organizations would help to aggregate their knowledge and influence; rogue employers would be on notice; their responsible counterparts would reap the competitive rewards; and conditions across the labor market—not only in terms of wages but in regard to safety and health, overtime, collective bargaining, employment discrimination, and the like—would improve accordingly. Consider the broader externalities or feedback effects:

And the virtuous circle produced by alt-labor, F15, and 911-4w will lock in over time. It is obviously impossible to know whether such a scenario would come to pass, since at this point it is entirely speculative. But we can gain some insight into the potential synergy between protective legislation and worker voice by considering the history of alt-labor, and worker centers in particular, at the state level.

Worker centers emerged in hostile environments, where employers held the cards and labor legislation was minimal (Galvin 2016, 334). In fact, Janice Fine holds that the first wave arose in the late-twentieth-century South “in response to institutionalized racism in employment, the rise of manufacturing and ‘big box’ retail, and the absence of labor unions as a vehicle for organizing” (Fine 2006, 9). But the mean minimum wage is nonetheless $9.23 an hour in thirty states and the District of Columbia where she and her colleagues found worker centers in 2005 (Fine, Doan, and Werberg 2005; U.S. Department of Labor 2019) and just over $8 an hour in states where they did not, including several northern states that have surprisingly low minimum wages. ⁵

Obviously, these are mere correlations; they say nothing at all about causality, which would be hard to unpack under the best of circumstances. But they are at least consistent with the idea that worker voice fuels protective legislation and vice versa in a positive feedback loop, which is also consistent with an abundance of case study material to that effect (see, e.g., Fine 2006; Garrick 2014; Galvin 2016, 342).

Political Feasibility: Labor Politics and Policy in an Era of Polarization and Austerity

Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson portray political polarization as the most vexing obstacle to policy reform in the current era and worry that it is aggravated by fiscal constraints in an era of federal deficits. “All else equal,” they argue, “policy designs that do not severely worsen these problems are more likely to gain a secure foothold” (Hacker and Pierson 2018, 7). Examples of reforms that fail to meet their test are easy to come by: universal preschool and free college poll well but cost a fortune, for instance, and Medicare for All is more controversial and costly still. Unlike most entitlements, however, raising and enforcing the minimum wage would seem to fit the bill. It is broadly popular and relatively cheap.

Most Americans support both a higher minimum wage (Sahadi 2014; Edwards-Levy 2016; DeSilver 2017) and one that is indexed to the rate of inflation (Program for Public Consultation [PPC] 2017), and this support is overwhelming among moderate as well as liberal voters. Data from the American National Election Studies suggest that more than two-thirds of self-identified moderates support a minimum wage increase (Figure 1) and that almost two-thirds of self-identified Democrats who voted for Donald Trump do as well. Given that these are the likely swing voters going into the 2020 election, politicians would be unlikely to lose, and would in all likelihood gain, by raising the minimum wage.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1

Favor a Minimum Wage Increase by Partisan Ideology (percentage)

A minimum wage increase would be costly, of course, but the costs would be borne by business rather than taxpayers. Leaked polls and documents suggest that 80 percent of businesses support an increase, with one well-known Republican pollster concluding that opponents of such proposals are “fighting an uphill battle, because most Americans, even most Republicans, are okay with raising the minimum wage” (DePillis 2016).

The 911-4w system would involve upfront and operating costs, to be sure, but they are not at all comparable to those involved in new entitlements. By way of illustration, consider the estimated deployment and operating costs of “Next Generation 911” service currently being considered by Congress, which would exploit the same skills and technologies as 911-4w. They are, under the most conservative scenarios, a rounding error in the federal budget (Mission Critical Partners 2018).

While the degree and nature of partisan support would thus vary with the details of the specific proposal, it should be easy to find a sweet spot that is both politically popular and productive—especially in the current economic environment. After all, the risk of inflation seems small. Most low-wage employment is found in nontradeable services that are invulnerable to offshoring. The current wage is more than a decade old. Rogue employers and greedy businesspeople are not popular (see, e.g., Rebovich and Kane 2002; Weakliem 2015). ⁶ And the new wage could be phased in over time, giving well-meaning employers the time they need to adjust.

Conclusion

This article offers a straightforward—if by no means complete—solution to a vexing problem. The problem is the evaporation of worker voice in the contemporary United States and attendant increases in poverty, inequality, and exploitation. Workers have lost their voice not only due to “employers gone rogue” (Bernhardt, Spiller, and Theodore 2013), and their enablers in federal, state, and local governments, I argue, but also because of a deeper mismatch between labor market institutions established in the New Deal era and an economy that has passed them by.

New Deal labor market institutions presupposed the large-scale industrial employment of a largely homogeneous workforce on a long-term basis, allowing unions, regulators, and judges to exploit economies of scale and stability in their efforts to organize, oversee, and defend workers on an ongoing basis. Unions could organize an enormous number of blue-collar workers, and regulators and judges could ensure than their rights were protected, at relatively low cost. And unions could go on to reproduce and potentially strengthen the system over time through political action.

But large-scale industrial employment is largely a thing of the past, and today’s workers would therefore be hard to organize, regulate, protect, and mobilize under the best of circumstances—for example, if the New Deal legal bargain were to be reestablished. While the “bricolage” (Fine 2011, 607) of organizations and strategies that make up alt-labor are beginning to fill the gap, in part by exploiting economies of scope that are better suited to a postindustrial economy, they are trapped in a vicious circle familiar to organizational pioneers throughout history: unless and until they achieve more shop floor or political victories, they are unlikely to grow and gain legitimacy; and unless and until they grow and gain legitimacy, they are unlikely to achieve enough victories to build a new system of labor and employment relations.

When confronted with similar transformations in the private sector, public policy-makers have stepped into the void in an effort to speed the transition. Most recently, for example, they accelerated the demise of the old economy and the rise of the new by entering trade and investment agreements that facilitated offshore manufacturing, encouraging research and development that facilitated automation, and bankrolling investments that fueled the growth of information technology—not to mention the Internet itself (Block and Keller 2011).

If public policy-makers can “pick winners” among employers, of course, and in so doing speed one transition, they can put a floor under workers, and in so doing ease another. After all, the proposal put forward here is not particularly controversial. It does not explicitly take sides in the debate between old and new labor, insofar as there is such a debate. It does not cost a lot of money, at least in relative terms. And it does not provoke much partisan hostility—since Americans favor raising the minimum wage by more than a two-to-one margin, and rogue employers are hardly popular. What it does do, however, is go some distance toward restoring the balance of power between workers and employers over the long run, a cause which is long overdue, by offering workers the support they need in the short run.