What do a former international president of the Service Employees International Union and a conservative author and columnist have in common? On many political questions, the answer is: not a whole lot. One of us, Andy Stern, has long been identified with the center Left and the Democratic Party. The other, Sohrab Ahmari, is a conservative writer and polemicist close to the GOP’s populist wing. Yet, when it comes to rebuilding worker power, we walk side by side. Indeed, one of the pillars of the work of the Center for State Labor Innovation — and of its magazine, Labor Innovation — is cross-partisanship.
For this, we make no apology. And we invite others, from the Left and the Right, to join us in this work.
The reasons behind this cross-partisan model are several. For starters, we believe that economic class is a structural fact of modern societies that transcends other divisions among wage-earners (and likewise among the owners of capital). Regardless of their partisan affiliation, religious beliefs, and other identities, workers are confronted by market realities that implicate their basic ability to put food on the table and to make ends meet. The coercion and lopsided bargaining power characteristic of market relations (all else being equal) bear down on Republican-leaning workers as much as Democratic ones.
The owners of capital understand this and respond accordingly. Thus, for example, “progressive” firms like Trader Joe’s and Starbucks have teamed up with Elon Musk to challenge the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Board. This alliance came notwithstanding profound disagreements between them over other issues (such as immigration and diversity in the workplace). When capital faces a threat to its economic power, in other words, the various capitalists have no trouble uniting to thwart it. We believe workers and their allies should think and act likewise.
Then, too, the major pro-worker reforms of the American past depended upon cross-partisan buy-in. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, (Teddy) Roosevelt Republicans found common cause with Progressives on trust-busting, child labor, and the length of the workday. Herbert Hoover’s model of “associationalism” — bringing together labor and business leaders to coordinate wages and working conditions — was a crucial predecessor of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. The New Deal, in turn, formed a governing consensus among both major parties through the mid-1970s, with Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon expanding the era’s reforming logic in new directions (such as environmental protection). Business bought in, too. In those years, heavily regulated, high-union-density capitalism was the mainstream way of doing business.
Likewise, the neoliberal model that overthrew the New Deal order beginning in the 1970s was itself the product of a cross-partisan consensus. It wasn’t just the Reagans and Thatchers who attacked labor’s power through union-busting, welfare cuts, and corporate globalization. It was also the Clintons, Blairs, and Schröders. (Asked to identify her greatest accomplishment, the Iron Lady herself named Tony Blair.) Now, as working people increasingly reject neoliberalism, there is a similar opportunity to form a consensus around new models of worker power and workplace regulation. This, even as we continue to disagree about much else, as the authors of this column no doubt will.
Andy Stern is a former international president of the SEIU. Sohrab Ahmari is the US editor of UnHerd and a Moynihan Public Scholar at the City of University of New York. Both are members of the steering committee of the Center for State Labor Innovation.
P.S. Interested in writing about building worker power? We’d love to hear your idea for Labor Innovation. Contact us here.
