The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor Highlight

And the movement that exists to empower labor errs by failing to use most of its latent power when it allows itself to become a mere lobbying-and-door-knocking mobilizer. In fact, organized labor holds the tantalizing but still unrealized possibility of being a transformative force in American politics not through electioneering, but through changing the electorate itself. A true revival of unions—say, a doubling of current union density, taking us back to where unions stood when the Reagan era and its attendant supercharging of inequality began—would exert a tremendous natural force to move the political center left.