Читать книгу Inequality and the Labor Market - Группа авторов - Страница 6

I am a labor lawyer. Being a labor lawyer has become a big part of my identity—how I think about who I am and how I view the world. I made the decision to be a labor lawyer in law school. A colleague once noted that the first big career decision that most law students have to make is whether they want to go into “people law” or “thing law.” People law careers include family law, criminal law, and labor law. Thing law careers include corporate law, banking, and real estate. I was drawn to people law because I loved reading cases and learning the stories of people’s lives—how they struggled and how the law could be a tool to overcome those struggles. In coming to the simple, but to me profound, realization that most people spend the bulk of their adult lives at work, I found my field—labor law. Our laws giving people the right to act and bargain collectively struck me as the best way for workers to achieve decent treatment in those many hours spent on the job.

My career has taken me to address labor law in many different settings—private litigation, government enforcement agencies, Congress, the Department of Labor, the White House, and now academia. Through this evolution, my focus has narrowed more and more on how the law can better enable workers to amass the power necessary to demand and win fair working conditions and a voice in our democracy. And so I have spent a lot of time with the National Labor Relations Act, the 1935 statute that first gave private-sector workers a federally protected right to join unions and engage in collective bargaining. The Act gives workers a path to creating power on their side of the equation, to balancing out the power that employers inherently possess. The NLRA is one of the greatest advances in people law. As my career shifted to the policy sphere, I moved from asking, “How can the law best be used to build power?” to “How can the law change to better help workers build power?” I had the privilege of working for a true champion for workers, Senator Edward Kennedy. In Senator Kennedy’s office, the fight for building worker power was not only a critical economic issue, but also a moral one. He taught me to believe deeply that only when workers have power can they have dignity on the job.

As the nation emerged from the Great Recession, I sat in my new role as a political appointee in the Obama administration—at the Department of Labor, National Labor Relations Board, and the White House—expecting to see new opportunities to support the growing power of workers. I expected this newfound growing power because my economist friends taught me that, in a tight labor market, workers’ ability to make demands grows. We watched each month as the unemployment rate got lower and lower and, as those economist friends taught me to say, the slack in the labor market diminished, creating optimal conditions for increasing wages and union density. But this improvement in conditions for workers wasn’t materializing. Wages remained stagnant and union density continued to decrease. And these trends continued despite consistent polling evidence that the majority of Americans both wanted wages to rise and supported unions.

I knew that several familiar factors were at play. First, the National Labor Relations Act was yet again proven out of date and incapable of serving as a mechanism for workers to turn a desire to be represented by a union into a reality. Thus, I returned my focus to labor law reform. As Benjamin Elga and I discuss in chapter 2, I continue to believe that fundamental labor law reform is necessary before we achieve anything resembling a fair labor market or a thriving democracy. Second, the anemic wage response to the recovery underscored how unresponsive our democracy is to the interests of poor and middle-class workers. Just look at the battle over raising the minimum wage. The last time we raised the minimum wage in the United States, Senator Kennedy led the fight. Senator Kennedy passed away more than 10 years ago. In the years since, support among Americans for raising the minimum wage has remained high, with a majority of voters in both parties supporting it. But the Senate has failed to vote for a minimum wage increase during the entire time that the Republicans have been in control of that chamber. So democracy reform, including campaign finance reform, must be a priority. But my laser-focus on building up worker power felt like a hike up a mountain that kept getting higher—with no summit in sight.

I thought back to the preamble to the National Labor Relations Act, which talks about the importance of “restoring equality of bargaining power between employers and employees.” For the first time, I thought about the power equation differently: not only did workers need more power on their side, but we also needed to consider how to rein in power on the corporate side. At this same time, my colleagues in the White House, including my coeditor Ben Harris, were leading important discussions about problems in the labor market. Attending meetings with these colleagues from the Council of Economic Advisers, the National Economic Council, the Office of the Vice President, and the chief economist of the U.S. Department of Labor was a master class in understanding labor markets.

I will admit to sitting in one of those early meetings and hearing the word “monoposony” for the first time and not knowing what it meant. Luckily, everyone who works at the White House stares at their phones during meetings, even while other people are talking, so no one noticed that I was quickly Googling this new term. As Ben details just below, these conversations began to circle around policies that could address the concentration of corporate power. Soon we had economists and lawyers collaborating on policies that could influence the fairness of the labor market. This work, we hoped, would lower the mountaintop so workers might have a shot at reaching the summit.