Workers Deserve Real Power. Unions Aren’t the Best Way to Get It.

On the first night of the Democratic National Convention, six labor leaders took the stage to endorse the party’s nominee. “Kamala Harris will keep fighting for workers,” promised the general president of the Laborers’ International Union of North America. The Republicans’ vision, said the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., is “a worker’s nightmare.”

Certainly, they are right about who will fight for the labor leaders. The Democrats’ Protecting the Right to Organize legislation would help them add more members to their unions. But the casual conflation of their own interests with those of workers misunderstands what workers want and what pro-worker policy can look like. If the goal is to place workers on a level playing field with employers so that they can advocate their own interests effectively and share fully in the prosperity they help to create, then getting more workers into those unions is not the only way. It’s not even the best way.

A more effective strategy is to ensure a tight labor market by constraining who employers can hire — in particular, by making it harder to offshore production to other countries or bring workers from other countries into the United States. Employers fight against such constraint tooth and nail because it forces them to improve the quality of the jobs they offer, to retain workers and draw people off the sidelines to fill open positions, and to invest in boosting productivity.

A recent analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis illustrates this effect. Firms lamenting labor shortages and hiring challenges for routine manual tasks tend to invest more and achieve larger productivity gains. Senator JD Vance has articulated the point well, warning that support for the free movement of labor across national borders “decimates the bargaining power of workers” by offering employers less expensive alternatives, while constraining access to inexpensive labor is “a tech-forward argument. If you can’t constantly do the same things with cheaper and cheaper labor, your economy is forced to innovate.”

Nor is America’s existing union model, codified by the Depression-era National Labor Relations Act, the only form a vibrant labor movement might take. In most of Europe, for instance, unions operate at the industry level rather than having to fight for recognition company by company. Within individual firms, rather than face off across a negotiating table, labor and management are more likely to establish joint “works councils,” through which the sides collaborate on solving workplace problems and improving operations. Under the N.L.R.A., such cooperative arrangements are significantly restricted, and unions want to keep it that way, even though workers repeatedly say they would prefer worker organizations “run jointly by employees and management.”

The idea that only the Democrats were a pro-worker party became conventional wisdom in the era between the Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump presidencies. The Republican Party regarded consumers’ living standards as the ultimate measure of economic health, and focused on raising them by creating the most business-friendly conditions for investment and growth.