Private enterprise never ceases to innovate. It never rests.
Business leaders constantly find new ways to organize production, manage supply chains, finance growth, deploy technology, lower costs, avoid risk, and shape the rules of the market. Some of that innovation creates real value. Some of it simply shifts risk from corporations to workers, from shareholders to families, from boardrooms to kitchen tables.
The latter puts high-road employers at a disadvantage, leaving businesses that want to invest in workers, compete on quality, and provide stable jobs undercut by competitors that treat weak standards as a business model.
Organized labor and other worker advocates have not had the same luxury. The institutions that built the American middle class still matter enormously, but they were designed for a different economy. Traditional unions and collective bargaining remain important tools for those workers lucky enough to have them. The right of workers to organize together remains essential. But a firm-by-firm, workplace by workplace organizing model, operating under federal labor law that has been stuck for decades, simply does not reach enough private-sector workers to restore stability, bargaining power, and voice at the scale today’s economy requires. Today, only 5.9% of private sector workers are covered by collective bargaining agreements, down from 48% of eligible private sector workers in 1946.
The lesson is not that unions, organizers, or other worker organizations have failed their members. It is that the entire apparatus of American labor law and organization has failed the non-members: the super-super-super majority of workers who will never have a union under today’s labor law regime. Even extraordinary shop-by-shop organizing, at a scale unseen in the lifetimes of today’s workforce participants, cannot reach a sufficient number of workers in the private sector to strengthen wages, benefits, and middle-class security at the pace that today’s low-wage economy requires.
That is why we launched the Center for State Labor Innovation, and why we are launching our new online publication, Labor Innovation.
Labor Innovation is a specialized, cross-partisan publication about the future of worker power, workforce standards, and state-based institutional reform. It is a place to take seriously a practical question: If the 20th-century labor law regime no longer works for enough workers, what institutions will?
Our answer begins with the states.
States have always been laboratories of democracy, especially for domestic policy. But constraining 20th century judicial interpretations of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) have forced labor policy debates to be treated as the exclusive property of the Federal government. We think that gets the moment wrong. Federal labor law is stuck. The economy is changing fast. Sectors like health care services, warehousing, logistics, restaurants, hospitality, residential construction, and property services collectively employ tens of millions of Americans. The vast majority of these workers don’t have the benefit of a union contract. Many jobs in these sectors do not pay a living wage. And yet these are some of the jobs most insulated from the threats of short-term AI-based job loss or offshoring. Add to that millions more workers in fissured and app-based employment, and the potential beneficiaries of state labor policy could easily total over half of the American workforce.
States cannot solve every problem. But states can experiment. They can, through regulatory authority undisputed in the post-Lochner era, bring workers, employers, and public representatives into collaborative public bodies to raise labor standards. They can help create institutions to set baseline standards across industries, improve job quality, reduce low-road competition, and give working people a durable voice in decisions that shape their lives.
That is the basic idea behind one of our policy proposals: workforce standards councils.
Done right, a workforce standards council is a state-created and state-administered public body that institutionalizes the authentic needs of workers, employers, and the public, then helps set and enforce minimum standards for an industry or occupation. It is public standards-setting with meaningful representation, not a private bargaining table or a state-selected bargaining relationship.
The details matter. Who sits on the council? How are representatives chosen? What role do leaders from labor and business play? What standards can be set? How do we build institutions that are legally durable, democratically accountable, and useful to the people they are supposed to serve?
This is, of course, just one policy idea. We seek and welcome others. The standard for any policy should be whether it gives hard-working Americans enough power to materially improve wages and benefits, the scale to reach entire industry workforces within a geography at once, and the sustainability to last over the long term.
These are not footnotes. They are the work.
Labor Innovation will take up this work in public, with seriousness, curiosity, disagreement, and practical ambition. We are interested in models that can be built, tested, revised, and scaled. We are interested in how states can use their authority to raise standards, strengthen worker voice, and support more stable local economies. And we are interested in the people already thinking across old boundaries about what comes next.
That is where the work begins.
There is no stable middle class without worker power. There is no broad prosperity if every industry is organized around a race to the bottom. There is no healthy democracy when millions of people experience the economy as a set of decisions made somewhere else, by people they will never meet, under rules they had no role in shaping.
The insecurity that workers feel is not theoretical. When 53% of people lack the means to cover a $1,000 emergency, work is not reliably translating into stability. The middle class is teetering on the precipice of insolvency when the typical man working full-time needs 62 weeks of wages to support a family. (The typical woman is worse off: it would take her 76 weeks). One surprise bill, one cut shift, one injury or one broken-down car can push a working family from getting by into crisis. A labor market equal to this moment has to make work a source of security again.
That is the spirit of this publication.
Readers should expect deliberation, not polemics. We will publish voices on the left, right, and in between, as long as they are serious about raising standards and giving workers a stronger voice in markets where private interests currently face too little counterweight. We will publish scholars, practitioners, policymakers, labor lawyers, worker advocates, business voices, and leaders who have spent their lives trying to make work pay.
The next labor breakthrough will not be a single bill, ballot measure, tactic, app, campaign, council, union, worker center, benefit fund, training program or court case. It will be an ecosystem of institutions that make workers more powerful and markets more fair.
Some of those institutions will be familiar. Some will emerge from still-developing pro-labor and labor-curious corners (progressive, conservative, centrist or none-of-the-above) that put shared prosperity for hard-working Americans at the center of their mission.
Some may take organizational forms that haven’t yet been invented. That’s how innovation works.
The question is whether labor is willing to innovate with the same seriousness that capital has always brought to its own advantage.
We believe it must. We believe states are the right place to begin. We believe workers need power that can scale. We believe standards should be set through institutions that hear from workers, employers, and the public. We believe a stronger middle class will require more than what once worked. It will require building what can work now.
Labor Innovation is our contribution to that work: a place to test ideas, sharpen arguments, learn from experiments, and help build the next generation of worker voice and labor standards.
We hope you will read it, argue with it, share it, and use it.
