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A funny thing happened in the days after we published “What Happened: The Trump Presidency in Review.” The collection’s emphasis on the success of economic policies that pushed the labor market toward full employment attracted substantial interest from proponents of looser fiscal and monetary policy. But that “strange new respect” came with the mandatory caveat that we were still wrong to suggest increased immigration enforcement and a slower inflow of new workers might be part of the same package.

American Compass’s work on corporate responsibility and labor reforms is highlighted as a key example of the growth a bipartisan consensus on the obligations of businesses.

How are wages set in the United States?

In the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump’s share of the white vote shrank while his share of the nonwhite vote increased.

Discussions about policies to help the multiracial American working class majority as a whole typically take a detour into the completely unrelated subject of how to help individuals escape from the working class.

After working as a manager at Chick-Fil-A for four years, Elizabeth Nowowiejski, a married mother of two living in Toledo, began a new job as a patient coordinator at a Read more…

Save for the Civil Rights Act, no single federal policy or program has done more to advance racial equity than Social Security.

Amber and David Lapp have written movingly about the current plight of America’s workers (here and here). The commodification of labor that they describe is not new by any means. Over the last 40 years, inequality has mounted, and workers in turn have seen their quality of life eroded, as their income share of GDP has collapsed.

Earlier this month my husband David and I wrote about Alex, a worker at an Ohio-based unionized factory, and the way the union saved his job after conflict with a supervisor.

American Compass’s Oren Cass discusses a conservative future for organized labor with Hamilton Nolan.

It’s an approach that echoes themes of the recent American Compass statement: a well-functioning system of organized labor should both “render[] much bureaucratic oversight superfluous” and reinforce the benefits of tight labor markets “through economic agency and self-reliance, rather than retreat to dependence on redistribution.”

Brad Littlejohn interviews American Compass’s Oren Cass about why conservatives should be interested in the future of America’s labor movement.

Socialists express their concern that a conservative pitch to the working class will succeed, “especially when Democrats continue to abandon unions and the working class.”

Would sectoral bargaining provide a better framework for American labor law?

The Republican Study Committee’s American Worker Task Force has just released a new report, “Reclaiming the American Dream: Proposals to Empower the Workers of Today and Tomorrow”.  As such it Read more…

Would sectoral bargaining provide a better framework for American labor law?

American Compass’s Wells King connects dysfunctional labor laws, declining union-participation, and partisan interests to the rise of economic inequality.