The AFL-CIO Executive Council endorsed Yale Professor Jacob Hacker’s just released economic blueprint, Prosperity Economics: Building an Economy for All, that says restoring the middle class must include restoring workers’ ability to bargain collectively.

The agenda for shared prosperity builds upon an understanding of the central role of workers, their unions and collective bargaining to address the full range of our society’s economic ills—our jobs and infrastructure deficits, our housing crisis, the hollowing out of our manufacturing sector, the disconnect between wages and productivity, the health care and retirement security crisis and the particular toll all of these crises have taken on communities of color and women.

In a statement from its August meeting in Washington, D.C., this week, the council urged the “political leadership of our country at every level” to use Professor Hacker’s work to help:

make shared prosperity a reality, starting by restoring workers’ ability to bargain collectively. It is time we turned values into action.

Read the full statement here.