Sustainable Alt-Labor

Contemporary labor organizing, with all its vibrance, variety, and vigor, seems to be in a virtuous cycle in which organizing success prompts favorable public attention, which in turn contributes to more organizing. More employees struck in 2019 than in any year since 1986. Since 2010, support for unions has climbed from less than half of Americans polled to about three-fifths. Some economists now believe that unions are “a critical check on the tendency of capital to vacuum up the gains from economic growth.”