3 - Yesterday’s Labor Law and Today’s Challenges

Summary

American labor law was constructed for one world; it is seriously dysfunctional in the very different world we now inhabit. The existing labor law framework was formed in an economy dominated by large, integrated, capital-intensive firms in manufacturing, communications, and transportation. Large branded companies like General Motors, General Electric, and General Foods employed their own production workers and janitors; those workers’ unions bargained with the power brokers of the national economy. Product market competition was bounded and muffled by a combination of trade barriers, regulation, and the sheer cost of transporting goods and services. Today, hypermobile capital, fissured production networks, deregulation, and globalized competition have utterly transformed the landscape of work. Those developments have weakened workers and empowered managers of the profitable “lead firms” that preside over geographically dispersed supply chains; they have separated most workers from the firms that profit from their work and govern their fate; and they have given firms greater means, motive, and opportunity to avoid or escape the constraints and costs associated with unionization.