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Alchemist:
Recently, a consensus spanning liberals to leftists has emerged that, over the last 40 years, the balance of power between labor and capital has shifted sharply in capital’s favor, and that this change has been economically and politically devastating for U.S. democracy. It is now commonplace to find economists making an argument that was deemed laughable only a decade ago: business’s domination of workers has slowed growth, fed asset bubbles and financial instability, and made the U.S. and world economies substantially more crisis-prone.
Many factors have contributed to the weakening of worker power including offshoring and import competition, unnecessarily tight monetary policy, and austerity. Pride of place, however, belongs to the deliberate decimation of unions, especially in the private sector, accompanied by the failure of labor law to keep up with employer anti-union tactics. Union density in the private sector has fallen to 6%, and with that collapse has gon