Is the labor law dam breaking?

American labor laws seem to be a way of transforming the innate antagonisms between labor and management into a more manageable form of duel: A union elected by the workers engages in collective bargaining with the managers. This is almost always on a business-by-business basis, and the parties are almost always left to their own devices—that is, with little or no government intervention beyond the basic laws. The economists call this “enterprise” bargaining. One of the problems this system does not address is the difference it creates between unionized businesses and others—even in the same industry. But the presence of the election is considered our panacea.

This is very much an American model. In the European Union, for example, industrywide or sectoral unions are commonplace. Whole sectors of an economy—all transportation workers, all auto or metal workers, for example—are in a single union, often overtly sustained by the government or by supportive laws. In some countries, the largest sectoral unions have Board of Directors representation.

The European model has garnered limited support here, but globalization, pandemics, and the anomalies highlighted by gig work and independent contractors have so profoundly changed our economy that new approaches to work, workers, and labor-management relations are beginning to appear. Government-sponsored sectoral bargaining is the latest.

Is California a harbinger?