Rebuilding worker power

Nearly every major Western intellectual tradition until the market fundamentalism of the late 20th century
understood the importance of organized labor to the well-being of workers and a well-functioning market
economy. An inquiry like the Economic Innovation Group’s American Worker Project must therefore grapple with the American labor movement’s dysfunction and the prospects for its revival.

“Upon all ordinary occasions [employers] have the advantage in the dispute, and force [workmen] into a
compliance with their terms,” warned Adam Smith in the 18th century.

“The laborer in an isolated condition, unable to hold out even against a single employer…will, as a rule, find his wages kept down,” agreed John Stuart Mill in the nineteenth, questioning the “morals” of those who did not “wish that the laborers may prevail, and that the highest limit [for wages], whatever it be, may be attained.”

In the 1950s, the conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet called unions “the true supports of economic freedom”. In the 1980s, St. John Paul II wrote that “the experience of history teaches that organizations of this type are an indispensable element of social life, especially in modern industrialized societies.”

The labor organization, by bringing workers together in solidarity and facilitating their collective action, creates power in the labor market, representation within the firm, and an institution of civil society that operates of, by, and for the common citizen. From the conservative perspective especially, all three of these functions are indispensable.