Behind sinking wages and growing inequality is the increasing imbalance between the bargaining power of workers and employers.  Because workers have not had a fair playing field on the job, they have gotten by through supplementing their lower wages with high levels of personal debt. This debt temporarily masked the failures of the nation’s stagnating wages and growing inequality, but those failures have been exposed by the current crisis.

The United States has no choice but to return to an economic strategy of broadly shared prosperity—a strategy that was remarkably successful in the first three decades after World War II. Because the playing field for workers is vastly uneven right now, labor law reform is essential to address the imbalance in bargaining power between employees and employers, reconnect wages to productivity growth and help rebuild the American middle class.