Our history and the experience of working people around the world tells us that only when workers have the right to organize and collectively bargain do societies enjoy shared, sustainable prosperity. America desperately needs a reinvigorated middle class, and an economy where dignity and opportunity are rights shared by all and where workers are our economy’s most valuable assets. But this vision will remain unfulfilled so long as the right to organize and bargain collectively remains an empty promise for most American workers. We know from our history and from the example of other countries that without strong unions, shared prosperity will remain out of reach.
This is why Yale Professor Jacob Hacker’s blueprint titled “Prosperity Economics” is so important. Professor Hacker has proposed a comprehensive vision for our nation's economic future—and he understands that for the vision to become reality, workers must be able to organize and bargain collectively. As Professor Hacker states, "Restoring the middle class means reversing the disconnect between wages and productivity, which means giving workers power to collectively negotiate for better terms of employment and a larger share of the rewards of growth."
Shared prosperity requires policies that create good jobs and growth, provide families with economic security and restore democracy both in the public square and in the workplace. Shared prosperity also requires policies that promote collective bargaining as Congress recognized in the preamble to the National Labor Relations Act.
Shared prosperity is not a luxury we can seek once we have escaped the current economic crisis. Shared prosperity, founded on a restoration of workers’ ability to bargain collectively, is the necessary path out of an economic crisis whose roots are stagnant wages, collapsing economic security, disinvestment in needed public services, rising inequality and a political process captured by the 1 percent at the expense of the 99 percent.
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 that these crises have taken on communities of color and women.
The AFL-CIO calls on 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.