Why States Are the Key to the Modern Labor Movement
· Time
Unions have a history of coming together when workers need them most.
During the Gilded Age of the late 19th century, labor unions sprang up in response to the harsh conditions of the industrial revolution. In the 1930s, a massive surge in union organizing helped the country find its way out of the Great Depression. Today, in our Second Gilded Age, gig work is leaving millions of Americans without access to a decent living. The question is: where are the unions now?
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Look to the states.
This spring, 70,000 workers won a new union in Massachusetts, the largest union organizing victory since 1941. The new App Drivers Union is made up of rideshare workers who have been excluded from key workplace protections. What’s even more remarkable is that we are about to blow past this milestone. California recently enacted a law giving more than 800,000 drivers the same right to unionize, and last week the California Gig Workers Union won enough driver support to trigger recognition. If we embrace this model of industry-wide standard-setting, or “sectoral bargaining,” we could witness the beginning of a new era of expanding worker power.
That’s important because our labor laws are broken. Collective bargaining in the U.S. has happened primarily at the worksite level since the passage of the federal National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) in 1935. Worksite bargaining remains the bedrock of building worker power. But decades of court decisions eroding workers' rights, relentless employer opposition, the exploitation of complex business structures, and worker misclassification have left worksite-by-worksite organizing incapable of reaching the vast majority of American workers. Union density, which once exceeded 30%, has fallen to historic lows, despite surging public interest in unions. The consequences are visible in decades of wage stagnation, widening inequality, and the erosion of the middle class.
But we do have creative solutions to empower workers right now. Sectoral strategies, in which wages and working conditions are set across an entire industry rather than at an individual worksite, are powerful complements to worksite collective bargaining. For one thing, sectoral bargaining minimizes any competitive disadvantage that might otherwise come from paying workers the higher wages in collective bargaining agreements. In other words, it helps eliminate a race to the bottom and can remove one of the main reasons that employers in the U.S. fight unionization.
Sectoral bargaining can also help build the organizing power that makes employer-level bargaining stronger. The sectoral model defines collective bargaining systems across the world—from Europe to South America to South Africa—in countries where labor unions still have the power to meaningfully redistribute wealth. It also explains why labor scholars and policy experts in the United States have shown a growing interest in sectoral bargaining in the last decade.
It comes as no surprise, then, that the AFL-CIO passed a landmark resolution at its annual conference last month endorsing sectoral bargaining for the first time in its history, embracing “opportunities to organize and bargain not just workplace by workplace but on an industrywide basis.” The federation's embrace of industry-wide standard-setting marks a turning point in how the American labor movement thinks about building worker power.
Federal labor law doesn’t provide for sectoral bargaining. Current judicial interpretation of the NLRA blocks states from adopting sectoral bargaining laws for most workers. But states do have the authority to provide sectoral bargaining for workers that the federal law has never covered: farm workers, domestic workers, gig workers, and delivery drivers treated as independent contractors regardless of how economically dependent they are on a single company. Those exclusions left space for Massachusetts and California to pass laws approving sectoral frameworks for rideshare drivers. These are powerful proof points. What has been missing is a comprehensive, replicable framework that any state can adopt today for targeted industries.
We worked with a team of labor law scholars, former federal labor officials, worker advocates, and union leaders to develop a Model State Sectoral Bargaining Law to meet this need. The model law would give workers the right to petition a State Labor Standards Board for recognition of a bargaining sector, grant organizing and access rights once minimum support thresholds are met, and create a process through which workers and employers can negotiate sector-wide agreements covering wages, benefits, working conditions, and the use of artificial intelligence and other workplace technology. Every employer in a covered sector would be bound by the resulting agreement, and workplace-level collective bargaining agreements may exceed—but never fall below—the sector-wide standards.
States that act now could immediately ensure that workers ignored by federal law can raise standards for themselves. More broadly, states have an opportunity to build the infrastructure of worker power that this country will need in the years ahead.
The tools we have are not equal to the moment we face. We believe the AFL-CIO's resolution is a signal that the labor movement knows it. But the major victories in Massachusetts and (soon) California provide a window into a way forward that includes state action granting sectoral bargaining rights. While federal law reform may well be needed in the long run, the Model State Sectoral Bargaining Law gives states somewhere to start. Workers have been waiting long enough.