Reimagining what labor policy can look like has never been more important.
At a time when 906 billionaires in America own double the wealth of the bottom 50 percent of American families, when the United States ranks at the bottom of Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) nations on worker organizing and bargaining rights, and when collective bargaining coverage in the private sector has fallen to a scant six percent from a high of 48 percent of eligible private sector workers in 1946, we urgently need innovative approaches to improve the lives of workers.
But what I know from a lifetime of organizing is that the hardest times can also produce the strongest organizers, like a diamond created under pressure.
Today’s inequality has spurred deep anger and frustration with the status quo, especially among younger generations who, for the first time, are worse off than their parents. That anger has helped fuel new momentum for organized labor. Despite sustained attacks on unions and workers, support for unions and workplace organizing is at record highs, especially among young people.
We are seeing the biggest uptick in labor organizing in a generation. Baristas, grocery workers, warehouse workers, auto workers, health care workers and others have gone to the picket line to demand fair wages and better benefits.
That organizing is building power across the country. It is also increasing pressure on Congress through efforts like my Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, crafted with the National Domestic Workers Alliance. The legislation would finally extend common workplace rights and protections to the 2.2 million domestic workers in the United States who have been excluded from key labor and safety laws.
Importantly, it also takes a sectoral approach. It would create a Domestic Worker Wage and Standards Board with representation from government, workers and employers to craft health and safety regulations, minimum wages and benefits, workplace standards, and enforcement mechanisms.
That is one model for how we can begin thinking differently about worker power.
But let’s be very honest: I’m doing everything in my power to move these ideas forward in Congress, but we also can’t wait for an ossified and gridlocked Congress to act.
We have seen some noticeable policy wins by House Democrats, even with Republican control. This June, Democrats used a mechanism called the “discharge petition” – which allows members to circumvent the Speaker of the House and bring a bill to the floor if it has support from over half of Congress – to pass the Faster Labor Contracts Act, a bill that would force employers to come to the bargaining table and help speed up the process of securing a first contract. However, the numerous attacks on worker power and institutions like the National Labor Relations Board, combined with Congress’s unwillingness to change antiquated rules, like the filibuster, have made it enormously difficult to pass policies that are wildly popular across party lines, from the PRO Act and the Raise the Wage Act to universal childcare.
I created a Monopoly Busters Caucus in the House, along with my co-chairs Pat Ryan, Chris Deluzio and Angie Craig, to take on the giant monopolies that are crowded out small business, competition and driving down wages for workers. We’re coming out with bold legislative proposals to break up monopolies and to push for better enforcement of anti-trust laws in a new and modern context.
And when Democrats retake the majorities in the House, we should pass the most comprehensive set of proposals to federally address these problems. That will require eliminating the filibuster in the Senate, a Jim Crow relic that was originally put in place to prevent passage of voting rights. The filibuster has already been eliminated to a simple majority threshold for the approval of Supreme Court justices and for tax cuts for the wealthiest, but Republicans have kept it in place for any bills that raise wages for workers, provide humane immigration reform or universal childcare.
At the same time, this work can’t wait. It’s important to resource work at the state level to develop new models of worker organizing and worker power.
States Can Lead
My home state of Washington offers a powerful example of what state and local innovation can accomplish.
Washington has one of the highest union densities in the country. It was the first state to index its minimum wage to inflation, back in 1998. Seattle, my hometown, became the first major city in the country to pass a $15 minimum wage and established a municipal office of labor standards designed to help shift the balance of power toward workers in the workplace.
When the state legislature was gridlocked, we went directly to the ballot. Voters approved statewide increases in the minimum wage and one of the most progressive paid leave policies in the country. More recently, Washington enacted a capital gains tax as an essential first step toward reversing an extraordinarily regressive state tax system.
Worker organizing has followed a similar pattern. Starbucks workers organizing in Seattle and across the country, like workers organizing at Amazon, have demonstrated how campaigns that begin in particular workplaces and communities can grow into something much bigger. But these campaigns also highlight the limits of Federal Labor law as it currently operates: years after Starbucks and Amazon workers first organized unions under federal labor law, they still don’t have a contract.
The driving force behind much of this organizing is an imbalance that workers can see and feel every day: the enormous gulf in power and wealth between billionaire CEOs and workers struggling to get by.
That frustration also creates an opening for populists from different ideological traditions to find common ground.
Many of the policies traditionally labeled “progressive” are not, at their core, particularly ideological. They appeal to a majority of people who recognize they are getting screwed by a rigged economy. They respond to something working people understand viscerally: The economy is not treating them fairly.
Building Power at the Scale of the Economy
State experimentation is already producing new approaches.
Sectoral strategies include wage boards like Minnesota’s nursing home board, which includes real incentives for workers to organize, as well as trigger laws in states such as New York and California that could become effective if federal preemption is wholly or partially removed and could allow workers to organize through majority sign-up.
These approaches could establish wage floors, benefit standards and safety norms across an entire sector far faster than organizing one workplace at a time. They could reduce the competitive race to the bottom among firms while also stabilizing labor costs and improving retention.
Sectoral standards can also create incentives for higher-road employers. A company that pays better wages and provides better benefits may reasonably fear being placed at a competitive disadvantage against firms that do not. Establishing standards across an industry gives everyone a more level playing field.
That matters even more in an economy defined by extraordinary consolidation.
Every industry, from grocery and agriculture to health care and technology, has rapidly consolidated. Large corporations have used crises as an excuse to raise prices and pad profits while simultaneously cornering labor markets, reducing workers’ choices and generating backward movement on wages and benefits.
The good news is that people are noticing.
Corporate consolidation has helped produce a renewed, cross-partisan demand for stronger antitrust enforcement, tougher scrutiny of mergers and greater attention to the enormous gap between billionaire CEO compensation and what workers are paid.
If we’re going to win against this consolidation, we have to be willing to rethink old assumptions.
Organizing for Scale
The question is this: What models of labor organizing can channel the enthusiasm of younger, often frustrated workers who support unions while also creating the scale of power necessary to confront consolidated industries?
Grocery workers offer a perfect example.
Imagine the power of grocery workers organizing nationally, or even statewide, rather than store by store. There are roughly 750,000 grocery workers nationally, and they have another enormous advantage: They are public facing.
They interact with their neighbors every day. We know their faces. They are part of our communities, and we want them to do well.
That creates tremendous opportunities for coalition building, labor-community organizing and sectoral approaches capable of producing change across an entire industry.
We also have to remember that the strength of any worker movement depends on the breadth of the coalitions it builds.
In 2003, as a new immigrant rights leader, I co-chaired the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride coalition with the Martin Luther King, Jr. County Labor Council AFL-CIO. It was part of a national push for immigrant rights led by UNITE HERE and other unions whose memberships increasingly included immigrant workers.
The lesson of that campaign stayed with me.
Workers experience exploitation on the job, but they do not stop being workers when they leave the workplace. Their economic security is also shaped by whether their families are safe, whether they can breathe clean air, whether they can plan their families and control their own bodies, whether they can marry the person they love, and whether they enjoy basic civil rights and human dignity.
Workers understand these things to be economic issues because they are essential to sustaining their lives and livelihoods.
Building worker power therefore requires building coalitions broad enough to reflect the lives workers actually live.
We Cannot Wait
Transforming worker organizing in America is both a necessity and an opportunity.
We absolutely need action at the federal level. We need laws that protect the right to organize, raise wages and restore workers’ ability to bargain collectively.
But we cannot wait for the federal government alone.
States can innovate now. They can experiment with sectoral standards, wage boards and new organizing models. They can bring workers, employers and government together to establish standards across industries. They can build structures capable of matching the scale of increasingly consolidated corporate power.
Most importantly, they can begin answering one of the defining economic questions of our time: How do we give working people enough power to shape the terms of their own lives?
If labor policy is going to truly serve everyday people, we need to expand our understanding of what it can look like and where it can be built.
The states are one of the places to begin.
Pramila Jayapal represents Washington’s 7th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives, where she serves on the Judiciary, Foreign Affairs, and Budget Committees. She is a Senior Whip of the Democratic Caucus and the Chair Emerita of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
