Workers Deserve Real Power. Unions Aren’t the Best Way to Get It.

On the first night of the Democratic National Convention, six labor leaders took the stage to endorse the party’s nominee. “Kamala Harris will keep fighting for workers,” promised the general president of the Laborers’ International Union of North America. The Republicans’ vision, said the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., is “a worker’s nightmare.”

Certainly, they are right about who will fight for the labor leaders. The Democrats’ Protecting the Right to Organize legislation would help them add more members to their unions. But the casual conflation of their own interests with those of workers misunderstands what workers want and what pro-worker policy can look like. If the goal is to place workers on a level playing field with employers so that they can advocate their own interests effectively and share fully in the prosperity they help to create, then getting more workers into those unions is not the only way. It’s not even the best way.

A more effective strategy is to ensure a tight labor market by constraining who employers can hire — in particular, by making it harder to offshore production to other countries or bring workers from other countries into the United States. Employers fight against such constraint tooth and nail because it forces them to improve the quality of the jobs they offer, to retain workers and draw people off the sidelines to fill open positions, and to invest in boosting productivity.