The Cambridge Handbook of U.S. Labor Law for the Twenty-First Century

American incomes and wealth today are far less equal than they were fifty years ago, and the inequality is growing. Though productivity and gross domestic product have risen, wages have not kept pace, meaning that workers are not sharing in the economic gains to which they themselves contribute. Social mobility has fallen commensurately, with significant political consequences.  

Over those same fifty years, unions have been in a deep decline. This decline has been met with ambivalence from much of America’s heartland and joy from the business community, but its effects are deeply troubling. Nonunion jobs pay less than union jobs and thus contribute to rising inequality. Much less acknowledged, and only now becoming better understood, is that high-paying union jobs help increase the wages even of nonunion workers. When union jobs vanish, the wage premium for other workers goes with them. 

The decline in union density long has been noted by American legal and industrial relations scholars, who have responded by advocating for changes to the National Labor Relations Act. This book advances a reform agenda far beyond these traditional fixes. The general premise is that American labor law should be reconsidered and reformed, in ways both incremental and radical, but in all cases with the overall goal of protecting workers even as the economy and the nature of work are changing rapidly. 

Structurally, the book starts with two introductory chapters, providing background empirical information on the dramatic decline of union density and the profound social consequences that decline has precipitated. The remainder of the book is comprised of five different Parts. Each Part starts with a chapter framing a specific problem or closely related suite of problems that has contributed to unions’ declines; subsequent chapters in that Part, each written by a different author, propose different types of reforms to address the problem. Many of these reforms emphasize private sector workplaces governed by the National Labor 1 Relations Act, though some chapters also address public sector unions as well as the nascent attempt to permit bargaining by independent contractors under state and local law. These proposals may not always be entirely consistent with each other, and no one person (including the editors) are likely to agree with each proposal. In our view, this is a major strength of the book – it collects many paths forward, allowing the proponents of each to make their best case. 

This book brings together the best labor and interdisciplinary scholars working today. They are, without exception, leaders in their fields, as the author biographies below will demonstrate. We have assembled a balance of empiricists and theorists, legal scholars and economics/policy scholars, senior luminaries and rising stars. Uniquely for books on labor topics, the scholars espouse diverse political perspectives. This makes internal dissention inevitable, but also produces a robust debate on how worker protection is best effectuated. 

All of the authors listed below have confirmed their participation and provided working titles and abstracts of their chapters. We have intentionally not placed tight subject-matter constraints on our authors. Our strategy has been to pick the very best scholars, provide them general guidance on their topic and how it would fit into the overall structure of the book, and given them the freedom to explore that topic so long as their resulting chapter fits within the book’s overarching premise. We believe that putting the best minds together and encouraging them to start conversations about labor reform in their own ways will be enormously generative, and are delighted with the topic proposals our authors have submitted.