The Coalition That Was Demobilized

The Coalition That Was Built

The American labor movement, as a structurally significant political and economic force, dates from the nineteenth-century industrial expansion and was substantially institutionalized in its modern form through the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (the Wagner Act).¹ The Act, signed by President Franklin Roosevelt on July 5 of that year, established the federal framework for collective bargaining: the right of private-sector employees to organize labor unions, to bargain collectively with employers through their elected representatives, and to engage in concerted protected activity (strikes, picketing, broader collective action). The Act established the National Labor Relations Board as the federal agency responsible for administering the framework. The framework’s principal subsequent development was the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which substantially constrained the Wagner Act framework through restrictions on the union-shop, prohibitions on certain categories of strike activity, and the broader pro-employer modifications that the post-war Republican-coalition Congress enacted over President Truman’s veto.²

The American union membership that emerged from the Wagner-Taft-Hartley framework reached, at the post-war peak in approximately 1954, approximately thirty-five percent of American non-agricultural employment.³ The unionized workforce was the operational mechanism through which the post-war American middle class accumulated the wage growth, benefits expansion, and broader economic security that the post-war American expansion has been remembered as. The union framework operated through both the direct collective-bargaining mechanism (which produced wage and benefit improvements at unionized firms) and through the broader threat-effect mechanism (which produced wage and benefit improvements at non-union firms whose competitive labor market the union firms had structurally affected). The cumulative effect across the 1945-1980 period was the substantial increase in the American labor share of national income that the contemporary period has substantially reversed.

The labor coalition’s political function in the post-war American political landscape was the structural counterpart of the donor class function that The Donor Class essay described.⁴ The labor unions provided the financial support, the volunteer infrastructure, and the broader political-mobilization capacity that the Democratic-coalition’s post-war legislative coalition required. The labor coalition’s lobbying expenditure, while substantially smaller in absolute terms than the corporate-coalition’s expenditure, was structurally distinctive in its concentration on the policy questions that affected the broader workforce rather than the narrow corporate-class questions that the corporate coalition principally addressed. The combined effect across the post-war period was the substantial labor-coalition counterweight to the corporate-coalition’s structural influence on the federal policy framework.

The Decline That Was Engineered

The decline of American union membership from the mid-1950s peak to the contemporary level has occurred through multiple mechanisms that the labor-economics literature has documented at length. The decline is not principally a function of any specific industry-sector composition shift; the decline has occurred across essentially all sectors of the American economy, including in sectors where comparator-country union membership has remained substantial.⁵

The first mechanism is the structural Taft-Hartley framework, which substantially constrained the Wagner Act framework’s organizing-effectiveness across the post-1947 period. The right-to-work provision (Section 14(b)), which permits states to prohibit union-shop arrangements that require union membership as a condition of employment, has been the operational mechanism through which the right-to-work states (currently approximately twenty-six states, with the post-2012 Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, West Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri additions producing the contemporary distribution) have substantially constrained union-organizing effectiveness within their jurisdictions.⁶ The empirical record on right-to-work effects has been substantially documented; the right-to-work states have, across the post-1947 period, exhibited substantially lower union-membership rates and substantially lower wage levels than the comparable non-right-to-work states.⁷

The second mechanism is the structural weakening of the National Labor Relations Board across the post-1980 period. The NLRB, which the Wagner Act had established as the federal agency administering the collective-bargaining framework, has been substantially constrained by the combination of the post-1980 budget reductions, the substantial politicization of the Board’s appointment framework that has produced substantial swings in the Board’s interpretation of the Wagner Act framework across administrations, and the broader institutional erosion that the federal administrative apparatus has experienced (the previous essay in this series).⁸ The NLRB’s contemporary capacity to enforce the Wagner Act framework’s protection of organizing activity is substantially less than the framework had originally assumed; the empirical record of organizing-related employer-violations across the contemporary period demonstrates substantially higher employer-violation rates than the prior framework had produced, with substantially less effective NLRB enforcement against the violations.

The third mechanism is the substantial expansion of the categories of work that the Wagner Act framework substantially does not cover. The contemporary American workforce includes substantial categories — independent contractors, gig-economy workers, agricultural workers (excluded from Wagner Act coverage from the original 1935 Act), domestic workers (similarly excluded), the broader categories of non-traditional employment — that the Wagner Act framework substantially does not protect. The post-2010 expansion of the gig-economy categories (Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart, the broader platform-based work population) has produced the operational outcome that substantial portions of the American workforce are, in operational terms, classified outside the Wagner Act framework’s coverage.⁹ The reform that would address the classification question — the categorical reclassification of gig-economy workers as employees rather than contractors — has been advanced repeatedly at the federal level (the Protecting the Right to Organize Act would substantially address it) without enactment.

The fourth mechanism is the substantial change in the broader American economic structure across the post-1980 period. The decline of manufacturing employment (which had been the principal foundation of post-war American union membership), the expansion of service-sector employment (which has been substantially less unionized historically), the broader shift from large-establishment to small-establishment employment (which has structurally constrained organizing effectiveness), and the broader globalization-era pressures on American manufacturing competitiveness — all have contributed to the structural decline of the union framework’s operational scope. The structural-change component is real and substantial; it is also not the principal explanation for the post-1980 decline, on the comparative-country evidence that has documented substantial union-membership preservation in comparator economies that have experienced similar structural-change pressures.¹⁰

The cumulative effect of the four mechanisms across the post-1955 period is the contemporary American union framework that operates against the structural conditions the previous sections described. The framework is substantially smaller in absolute and relative terms than the post-war framework was; substantially constrained in its operational scope by the right-to-work and Wagner Act-coverage limitations; substantially weakened in its enforcement framework by the NLRB capacity reduction; and substantially less effective as the structural counterweight to the corporate coalition’s influence that the post-war labor coalition had been.

The PRO Act and the Sectoral-Bargaining Alternative

The contemporary American labor-reform framework has been organized principally around the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which has been advanced repeatedly across the post-2019 Congresses and which has not been enacted.¹¹ The PRO Act would substantially modify the contemporary Wagner Act framework: the Act would override state right-to-work laws (substantially eliminating the right-to-work states’ competitive-position advantage over non-right-to-work states); would substantially modify the contractor-classification framework (using the “ABC test” that California’s Assembly Bill 5 had established to substantially limit the contractor classification); would establish substantial penalties for employer violations of organizing-related rights (which the contemporary NLRB framework substantially lacks); and would broadly modernize the Wagner Act framework for the contemporary workforce.

The PRO Act has passed the House under Democratic-coalition majorities; the Act has not advanced in the Senate against the Republican-coalition’s filibuster. The structural pattern is the pattern the broader series has documented: substantive labor-reform legislation passes the House and dies in the Senate, against the structural barriers the campaign-finance and electoral lock-ins have institutionalized.

The sectoral-bargaining framework, which has been advanced by labor-economics scholars (David Madland, Sharon Block, Benjamin Sachs) and by labor-coalition advocates as a structural alternative to the firm-by-firm bargaining framework the Wagner Act framework operates under, has not been advanced as a contemporary federal reform proposal at substantial scale.¹² The sectoral-bargaining framework, which operates in many comparator democracies (Germany, the Nordic countries, Australia in modified form), would establish industry-wide collective-bargaining frameworks that would substantially modify the structural-disadvantage that the firm-by-firm framework has produced for the smaller-establishment American workforce. The framework’s principal operational features include: the establishment of sector-wide bargaining councils that would negotiate wage floors, benefit standards, and broader employment conditions across all firms in the sector; the substantial reduction of the firm-level organizing requirement that the Wagner Act framework imposes; and the broader structural modernization that the contemporary American workforce structurally requires.

The combined PRO-Act-and-sectoral-bargaining framework would, on the operational record of the comparator democracies, substantially address the structural decline of American union membership that the previous sections described. The framework’s adoption would require the legislative coalition that, on the structural pattern the broader series has documented, the contemporary American political-economy lock-in has prevented from assembling.

What’s at Stake

A platform position on labor and the right to organize — proposed for addition to The Intelligent Party’s positions framework — would, on the framework the previous sections have described, address the structural feature that the broader fourth-settlement framework’s other components depend on. The component would have approximately the following elements.

The first element would be the legislative enactment of the PRO Act, including its principal substantive components: the override of state right-to-work laws, the substantial modification of the contractor-classification framework, the substantial penalties for employer organizing-related violations, and the broader modernization of the Wagner Act framework for the contemporary workforce.

The second element would be the establishment of sectoral-bargaining frameworks for the principal American economic sectors. The framework would substantially modify the firm-by-firm collective-bargaining framework that the contemporary Wagner Act framework operates under, on the operational model of the comparator democracies whose sectoral-bargaining frameworks have demonstrated substantial effectiveness in addressing the structural-disadvantage that the firm-by-firm framework has produced.

The third element would be the substantial restoration of NLRB capacity. The component would address the institutional-capacity question that the previous essay in this series identified as the structural prerequisite for the broader framework’s operationalization, with specific application to the labor-relations enforcement framework that the contemporary apparatus is substantially unable to administer at the scale the framework requires.

The fourth element would be the broader structural reform of the gig-economy framework, including the categorical reclassification of platform-based workers as employees rather than contractors, the establishment of portable-benefits frameworks that would address the contemporary disconnect between employment status and benefit access, and the broader modernization that the contemporary platform-based workforce structurally requires.

The political coalition required to enact the framework does not currently exist. The conditions under which it might assemble are the conditions the broader fourth-settlement framework requires.

The realism the broader series has called for, applied to labor and the right to organize, is the realism that the structural reform is achievable on the framework the comparator democracies have demonstrated; that the framework’s operational application requires the legislative and institutional capacity that the broader fourth-settlement framework would establish; that the principal obstacles to its enactment are the corporate-coalition lobbying complex and the broader structural features that the campaign-finance reform of The Donor Class would address.

The coalition that was demobilized is the coalition the post-war American labor framework had structurally established and that the post-1980 framework has substantially eroded. The structural restoration of the framework that historically supported the coalition is the assembly the broader fourth-settlement framework requires. The reconstruction is the assembly the next decade will determine.

---

Notes