America’s Workers Need a Labor Union Comeback

There are two basic ways to improve the economic situation of the middle and lower classes. First, you can use taxes and government spending to shift income down from the top, either via direct transfers or through services like health care. Second, you can change the laws governing markets, with the goal of producing better outcomes for low- and middle-wage workers. These two approaches are sometimes called redistribution and predistribution.

Much of the Democratic presidential contest has focused on redistribution — higher taxes on the wealthy, nationalization of health insurance and so on. But candidate Pete Buttigieg recently released a plan for predistribution, to relatively little fanfare. Buttigieg’s plan would raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour and peg it to inflation after that. It would strengthen anti-harassment laws, mandate that businesses reveal how much they pay men and women, beef up overtime rules, encourage predictable scheduling for hourly workers and implement various other workplace protections. But perhaps most importantly, Buttigieg’s plan would rewrite U.S. labor law to strengthen unions.