Labor law is, in brief, an invocation to class collaboration, or at least class peace. It has above all a regulatory function, which is hidden under its apparent declaration of the rights of labor. If this characterization appears unduly harsh, recall the Supreme Court’s many employer-friendly amendments to the Labor Relations Act even before the Taft-Hartley amendments of 1947, of which more later. Section 8 of the Labor Relations Act granted employers free speech rights that effectually legalized tactics designed to intimidate workers during union representation election campaigns. These rights were not a major factor in union representation elections until the late 1940s. Since then, first in the South and then almost everywhere in the country, employer intimidation of workers became a routine feature of these elections

[...] Since the Depression of 2007, they have all discovered that the economy no longer has room for most of them. But their alienation is more than economic. Joblessness and declining material prospects may be solved within a political system willing to accommodate at least some of the disaffected. What the system cannot do is address the political and cultural disaffection that economic alienation has bred. Like the New Left, whose members for the most part shared the material comfort produced by the United States’ favorable position in the global economy and its domestic advantages as a permanent-warfare state, the current generation of the “new middle class” harbors a deep critique of the system, one that cannot be healed by the same left-liberal program of jobs, jobs, jobs. Too many of the jobs produced now do not heal the lives of those who take them.