Can Democrats Offer a New Vision for Labor?

As in recent years, millions of working Americans marked this past Labor Day with a sense of trepidation. While the holiday’s ubiquitous steep sales suggested that distributors and retailers haven’t yet passed on the full impact of Trump’s tariffs (recently jeopardized by a federal appeals court), Americans are afraid new price hikes are around the corner. And the pervasive discontent of the last fifteen years has hardly ebbed. A new Wall Street Journal poll finds that since the pandemic the percentage of Americans who believe they have a “good chance” to lead better, more prosperous lives has plummeted to a quarter. At the turn of the century, over seventy-five percent expected to get ahead. Millions either feel poorer or believe their minor pay bumps and savings have been vacuumed up by larger bills for routine goods and services.

Worse, the ability to counter any of these trends through politics or the workplace feels negligible. Modest gains, mostly reflecting phased-in minimum wage hikes initiated last decade in several cities and states, have been outpaced by extraordinary housing costs, sharp price increases for basic groceries and modest family excursions, and higher credit card interest rates and monthly minimum payments. Yet the ongoing debate between Abundance converts, anti-monopolists, “care economy” progressives, and the tariff-friendly parts of the labor-left is more of an academic exercise than something that would yield a blueprint for action.

Currently, few elected Democrats are making an effort to clarify their top economic priorities following the sluggish response to “Bidenomics.” Struggling workers and cost-weary households don’t know who to turn to. Collective bargaining power remains stratified and has come under renewed assault by the Trump administration. Although the pandemic and its aftermath sparked an uptick in strike activity and organizing drives from Starbucks to Amazon to Uber, union households are typically older, concentrated in core legacy industries and the public sector, and comprise a dwindling fraction of the total workforce.

As the boomer retirement accelerates, the labor market is also undergoing a massive structural and demographic shift that Washington is plainly ill-prepared for. The share of Americans working as freelancers in some capacity has surged to over 64 million people, or nearly 40 percent of the working population, and is expected to grow as AI disrupts professional salaried work and spreads the demand for “labor flexibility” to fields in which expertise was once tied to greater employment security. Some of this growth reflects a genuine willingness on the part of workers to forge their own path and maximize the creativity and network power latent in the knowledge economy. Yet market fundamentalists would be mistaken to crow that this testifies to the march of individual liberty and the rejection of active government or collective agency. Unions enjoy their highest approval in decades, while consumers and small businesses are arguably attuned to the perils of monopoly power and anticompetitive practices at a level not seen since the Second World War.

Middle- and working-class Americans are clearly fed up with scraping by. Even so, many seem resigned to long-term labor market trends, believing American capitalism, more than ever, is a sink-or-swim system bereft of public goods and widespread upward mobility. Such pessimism about the dignity of work and the merits of trying to make an “honest living” is bound to affect how Americans approach core life decisions—and whether they take them up at all. That is a sociopolitical time bomb that, unaddressed, will make Trumpism’s extended pull seem like a minor affair.

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The great changes afoot nonetheless present a conundrum for social democrats hoping to forge a pro-labor policy agenda that is more than the sum of its parts. Americans are understandably distraught about the possibilities for a meaningful and fulfilling life, as reflected in record-low birth rates and the distressing rise in suicide and early deaths among Gen Z and millennials. For many, the imminent future seems to only promise more unpredictability, harder trade-offs, and fewer opportunities to achieve the American dream. And they deeply sense that with every intermittent, minor improvement to their personal welfare, there is a series of other things going wrong that dwarfs whatever pleasure is to be gained from sleeker devices and new apps.

At the same time, many Americans are no longer accustomed to the idea of a social contract that combines an ethos of self-determination, civic belonging, and egalitarianism. The tides of globalization and advanced computer technology have introduced irreversible changes intimately tied to how Americans express their individuality, participate in the economy, and pursue their ideas of the “good life.” They have become more atomized but also less enamored of obligation and tradition. Few in reality seem terribly satisfied by the directionless, media-saturated character of modern existence. But resistance to change feels rooted in misguided nostalgia and thus too redolent for all who recoil from Trumpism of the grievances that originally fueled it. There is also uncertainty about how much rewarding structure can be carved out of a socioeconomic system that privileges relentless disruption over providing livelihoods that support “conventional” personal milestones. If settling down was once the choice of squares and conformists, many Americans now simply lack the confidence and resources to put down roots and commit to something greater.

Americans, moreover, feel they are on the edge of a great upheaval that will render useless their best efforts to do better than their parents. Perhaps not since the 1880s and 1890s, when the forces of mass production and corporate capitalism upended the lives of artisans, small producers, and middling proprietors, have so many Americans felt beat down by economic change and deprived of a basic foothold. Ironically, that makes doing the things motivated Americans were once expected to do—pursue a stable career, find a spouse, start a family, buy a home—appear risky; but if one can hardly earn enough money to satisfy their own basic needs, how could they have faith they could provide for others?

This explains, in part, why so many Americans, even self-described progressives, are now deeply skeptical of capital-p Progress. For every apparent step toward social inclusion and greater personal freedom, our ability to consolidate and improve upon the developmental gains of past generations has become more elusive. Society is presented by optimists as a mosaic of forward-looking citizens possessing unprecedented material comforts, yet growing numbers feel as though they are undervalued or, worse, have been robbed of their potential.

Techno-optimists in particular should consider the following trends. Since the 1970s, most two-parent households have had two earners, yet the household savings rate is less than half the average witnessed in the booming sixties. There have been laudable leaps in diversity and formal political equality (and the acceptance thereof), yet most economic gains this century have been captured by the top ten percent. First-time home buyers are generally older than those of past generations, while two-thirds of renters say they can’t afford a home—up from 45 percent in 2013. Family formation, once foundational to working-class communities, is increasingly linked to perceptions of economic mobility. Except among the highly educated, marriage rates have collapsed.

Even the chief fruits of globalization and the knowledge economy have been underwhelming. Free trade resulted in cheaper goods in some sectors but did little to substantially improve Americans’ economic security. The tech revolution put labor-saving and time-saving technology into millions of hands, yet Americans consistently report being overworked and suffering from heavy stress. And the positive impact of tech on education—a major source of optimism in the Clinton era—has been dubious at best. Young students’ reading scores, already lagging peer nations before the pandemic, have declined further. Perhaps more disappointing, we haven’t had a wave of scientific and medical breakthroughs that dramatically reduced chronic disease and eliminated major health disparities. Despite notable advances in public and environmental health at the turn of the century, life expectancy has increasingly diverged from other developed countries.

These and other trends go some way toward explaining the ambience of despair and distrust. Still, the failings of the American economy are probably best encapsulated by two forms of privation that New Deal liberals surely thought would be unthinkable in the 21st century. Around fifty million rely on food banks, while the phenomenon of homeless full-time workers has spread across the country. These are more than stains on the American conscience. They are acute signs of a broken system.

What strikes fear in the hearts of Americans who are doing better than just hanging on is that they might be next. That there are no more guarantees of middle-class security. And they are right to wonder if our spectacle-obsessed politics is too dysfunctional to meet society’s challenges. For the most part the message from Washington is that the onus is on regular Americans to simply adapt—as if that hasn’t already been happening with foreboding results. The current trajectory may nevertheless continue despite Americans’ profound anguish and alienation from the establishment. Absent a civilization-rending event, the thrust of history suggests Americans will feel compelled to embrace more technological complexity on the one hand and accept less order and predictability in their economic lives on the other.

This points to the paradox of a populist age in a “postindustrial” (and increasingly “postliterate”) society no longer drawing the masses into the processes of development. At least in Western Europe and North America, modern history taught that rising inequality and rising expectations typically fueled demands for a sweeping political response to the urgent socioeconomic problems precipitated by industrialization. The dilemma for progressives drawing inspiration from the Wilsonian and New Deal traditions is that the pace of change—including for the nature of employment and the distribution of work itself—threatens to limit the impact of reforms that might have been more comprehensive in a previous, more regimented era. Now, as fewer Americans make decisions that reflect a “traditional” stake in the system, some may judge it is either too complicated or, in fact, unnecessary to formulate policies that attempt to satisfy broad social needs. Unfortunately, those opponents of bold reform have a powerful alibi of sorts in the form of polarization. While many Americans believe their country faces severe challenges, there is very little durable agreement about how to solve them.

There is also the matter of whether social democracy, as both a political philosophy and a system of socioeconomic relations and development, has been lost to history. In a democracy, orders and paradigms, even those forged over the opposition of entrenched interests, are the products of consensus. And consensus is conditional on society believing it has shared norms and values; that it has a common purpose oriented to the development of future generations; that there are sometimes necessary, even prudent, compromises in politics; and that core institutions are capable of upholding and advancing the greater good. These pillars of social trust are missing from contemporary society. It is possible technology itself will prevent their restoration. Regardless, the upshot for those willing—or eager—to bid farewell to the lessons of the New Deal order seems clear. A regime of market governance cannot be faithfully replicated in full for a society that no longer exists and whose customs and rhythms have been made obsolete (unsentimentally at that).

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It would nevertheless be an abdication of duty for any political coalition determined to harmonize justice and progress to proffer band-aids to the disruptions on the horizon. Economic trends have unambiguously disempowered large swathes of Americans and lowered their expectations. There are also technologies being introduced whose implications for our frayed social bonds most of our current political leadership is incapable of fathoming. Yet there are still effective tools that can be dusted off to manage capitalism, provide real protection from the vagaries of the market and the excesses of its “animal spirits,” prevent (not just penalize) economic predation, and facilitate opportunities for renewal in the least likely of places.

Moreover, the lessons of the past cannot be ignored so long as we have the political consciousness to recognize the good wrought from what were, in most respects, much harsher conditions. The great (though not sole) redeeming virtue of midcentury America is that despite its prejudices and formal discrimination, it championed a growing middle class, accommodated the personal liberties and desires realized therein, and acknowledged the developmental benefits that arose from a far more equitable distribution of economic power. Importantly, the latter was reflected not just in after-tax wages, benefits, home ownership, and deconcentrated supply chains, but in the devotion of time—time freed up through shorter workdays, a family wage, and better health—toward community activities and communal recreation. All else being equal, shared wealth meant shared commitments, not least to an inclusive patriotism bowed neither by the violent provocations of arch-reactionaries nor the unforgiving critiques of radical cynics and utopians.

That may seem quaint or, worse, an oversimplification. But as even left-wing critics of the New Deal order have recognized, this was the broad essence of the period. From the 1930s to the 1970s, through McCarthyism and the civil rights movement, responsible politics was, at the end of the day, mostly about fine-tuning the right mix of stability and dynamism under democratic capitalism. To some degree the leaders of that time, despite their myriad flaws, succeeded. By contrast, global economic integration, the rise of a postindustrial society, and the superficial cultural obsession with “self-actualization,” though granting the illusion of unfettered consumerism and boundless reinvention, have coincided with widespread loneliness, less intergenerational advancement, and a troubling decline in associational life. And our perplexed leaders, though aware of these sources of anomie, have mostly paltry answers.

The window for a more courageous stand is upon us once more. But more than ever, the voices of radical reform must be explicit and genuine about what is worth conserving in America. Preserving the dignity of work in an age once fancifully conceived as liberating people from it may prove to be the most salient theme of the next decade. That will require concrete promises to nurture Americans’ skills and talents, shield them from joblessness, and help them make life decisions unclouded by excess debt. But determined reformers will also have to translate greater economic agency into a greater sense of purpose; young people need to believe that there is truly something worth “building” in one's life. Democrats in this moment thus need to affirm the interdependence between responsible self-fulfillment, an economy anchored around shared productivity and enforceable rules against predation, and civic consciousness. If not, the ominous combination of stagnant development and technological disruption promises to enervate society and reinforce the already pervasive belief that the country is plagued by unsolvable social and spiritual problems.

Ultimately, the advance of reform may well hinge on that archaic concept, leadership that transcends favor to party or section. For all who want to restore the fabric of this country, they should hope that today’s would-be insurgents can rise to the occasion—and reinvigorate popular belief in collective progress before the next great upheaval.