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This Article proposes an innovative approach to remedying the crisis of political inequality: using law to facilitate organizing by the poor and working class, not only as workers, but also as tenants, debtors, welfare beneficiaries, and others. The piece draws on the social-movements literature, and the successes and failures of labor law, to show how law can supplement the deficient regimes of campaign finance and lobbying reform and enable lower-income groups to build organizations capable of countervailing the political power of the wealthy. As such, the Article offers a new direction forward for the public-law literature on political power and political inequality. It also offers critical lessons for government officials, organizers, and advocates seeking to respond to the inequalities made painfully evident by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The ideal of meritocracy is attractive: individuals obtain wealth, leadership roles, and social status based upon talent and hard work, rather than by virtue of their position in the aristocracy or their family connections. Sometimes framed as "equality of opportunity" or even "the American Dream," meritocracy has for decades garnered widespread popular support in the United States, becoming more embedded over time. Yet, mounting empirical evidence from social scientists demonstrates that our country is not really a meritocracy. Some wield massive advantages from the beginning; others, no matter how talented and hardworking, have little hope of obtaining a coveted spot at an Ivy League institution or even a decently paying job.

There is a growing consensus among scholars and public policy experts that fundamental labor law reform is necessary in order to reduce the nation's growing wealth gap. According to conventional wisdom, however, a social democratic approach to labor relations is uniquely un-American – in deep conflict with our traditions and our governing legal regime. This Article calls into question that conventional account. It details a largely forgotten moment in American history: when the early Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) established industry committees of unions, business associations, and the public to set wages on an industry-by-industry basis. Alongside the National Labor Relations Act, the system successfully raised wages for hundreds of thousands of Americans, while helping facilitate unionization and a more egalitarian form of administration. And it succeeded within the basic framework of contemporary constitutional doctrine and statutory law. By telling the story of FLSA's industry committees, this Article shows that collective labor law and individual employment law were not, and need not be, understood as discrete regimes – one a labor-driven vision of collective rights and the other built around individual rights subject to litigation and waiver. It also demonstrates that, for longer than is typically recognized, the nation experimented with a form of administration that linked the substantive ends of empowering particular social and economic groups to procedural means that solicited and enabled those same groups' participation in governance (to the exclusion of other groups). Ultimately, recovering this history provides inspiration for imagining alternatives to the current approach to worker participation in the American political economy and to administrative governance more broadly.

In ancient Roman religion and myth, Janus is the god of beginnings, transitions, and endings. He is often depicted as having two faces, one looking to the future and one to the past. The Supreme Court's Janus v AFSCME case of last Term is fittingly named.Stunning in its disregard of principles of stare decisis, Janus overruled the forty-year-old precedent Abood v Detroit Board of Education.The Janus decision marks the end of the post – New Deal compromise with respect to public sector unions and the First Amendment. Looking to the future, Janus lays the groundwork for further attack on labor rights – as well as for a broader erosion of civil society and democracy at the expense of corporate power. In that way, Janus represents an unequivocal transition to what Justice Kagan termed a "weaponized" view of the First Amendment among the Court's majority – indeed, far more so than her dissent elaborates. But Janus may also have another, more hopeful, forward-looking face. Ultimately, Janus's undoing of the compromise that governed union fees for nearly fifty years provides the opportunity for a systematic rethinking of the relationship between labor and the Constitution and, more generally, of the meaning of the First Amendment.

As Parts I and II of this Essay elaborate, the examination yields three observations of relevance to constitutional law more generally: First, judge-made constitutional doctrine, though by no means the primary cause of rising inequality, has played an important role in reinforcing and exacerbating it. Judges have acquiesced to legislatively structured economic inequality, while also restricting the ability of legislatures to remedy it. Second, while economic inequality has become a cause célèbre only in the last few years, much of the constitutional doctrine that has contributed to its flourishing is longstanding. Moreover, for several decades, even the Court's more liberal members have offered only tepid opposition to economically regressive constitutional interpretations, sometimes helping shape them. Third, while much constitutional law relating to the distribution of economic and political power and the non-existence of social welfare rights now seems indisputable, sometimes even quintessentially American, regressive holdings were, in fact, hotly contested and deeply divided. Indeed, the losing side had equally strong, if not stronger, doctrinal arguments. As discussed in Part III, these descriptive observations, in turn, form the basis for three claims about the future of constitutional law. First, judges matter. Progressives ought not lose sight of the importance of judicial appointments. Although strong arguments counsel against turning to courts as primary agents for social and economic change, courts are critical in constructing the political economy. Second, for those who object to economic inequality, mere resistance to the Trump agenda and efforts to return to the constitutional status quo ante are not enough. In particular, the liberal embrace of judicial minimalism has contributed to the judicial fortification of economic inequality; a fundamental shift is needed. Third, such change is plausible, not utopian. Doctrine that now often seems natural is by no means fixed. Particularly if Americans begin to challenge inequality in the political and social realm, constitutional change in the courts will become not only imperative but also achievable.

A well-documented problem motivates this symposium: The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) does not effectively protect workers' rights to organize, bargain, and strike. Though unions once represented a third of American workers, today the vast majority of workers are non-union and employed "at will." The decline of organization among workers is a key factor contributing to the rise of economic and political inequality in American society. Yet reforming labor law at the federal level – at least in a progressive direction – is currently impossible. Meanwhile, broad preemption doctrine means that states and localities are significantly limited in their ability to address the weaknesses in labor law, even where local politics would permit such gains. A well-documented problem motivates this symposium: The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) does not effectively protect workers' rights to organize, bargain, and strike. Though unions once represented a third of American workers, today the vast majority of workers are non-union and employed "at will." The decline of organization among workers is a key factor contributing to the rise of economic and political inequality in American society. Yet reforming labor law at the federal level—at least in a progressive direction—is currently impossible. Meanwhile, broad preemption doctrine means that states and localities are significantly limited in their ability to address the weaknesses in labor law, even where local politics would permit such gains.

In his important and provocative Foreword, Professor Daryl Levinson criticizes American constitutional law for failing to attend sufficiently to questions of power, which he defines as "the ability to effect substantive policy outcomes by influencing what the government will or will not do." As Levinson details, structural constitutional law has focused on how power is distributed among governmental institutions. It has not consistently or adequately considered how power is – or should be – distributed among social groups. Ultimately, Levinson suggests that the narrow focus of separation of powers law and theory on "equalizing the power of government institutions" lacks normative force. Equalizing power among interests and groups in society is a more worthwhile project than checking, balancing, and equalizing power among governmental institutions. In the latter, he concludes, "it is hard to see any spark."

This essay begins with a puzzle: scholars have built a robust set of constitutional claims about labor rights, claims with deep roots in the labor movement's own past struggles and its own traditions of constitutional claim-making. Yet, workers' movements today have made no use of these claims, Andrias reports. The reason, she suggests, has to do with the deep mutual hostility between workers' movements and the courts. If past were prologue, workers could at least use such arguments outside the courts, but, she argues, "in our [contemporary] legal culture, constitutional arguments are primarily judicial arguments," and have a way of ending up in court, where workers tend to lose as they have most of the time for more than a century. Thus, it makes sense for workers to avoid constitution talk. At the same time, Andrias argues, to lay the groundwork for any future constitution of workers' rights – rights "to a union and to collective bargaining, to decent wages and benefits, to basic dignity and a measure of democracy at work" – we would need fundamental political changes that only organizing can bring about. She argues that campaigns such as the Fight for $15 and the Domestic Workers Alliance, working outside the confines of labor law as it is traditionally understood, may be laying the political groundwork for a future "anti-oligarchy Constitution."

Labor law is failing. Disfigured by courts, attacked by employers, and rendered inapt by a global and fissured economy, many of labor law's most ardent proponents have abandoned it altogether. And for good reason: the law that governs collective organization and bargaining among workers has little to offer those it purports to protect. Several scholars have suggested ways to breathe new life into the old regime, yet their proposals do not solve the basic problem. Labor law developed for the New Deal does not provide solutions to today's inequities. But all hope is not lost. From the remnants of the old regime, the potential for a new labor law is emerging. In this Article, I describe and defend the nascent regime, which embraces a form of social bargaining long thought unattainable in the United States. The new labor law rejects the old regime's commitment to the employer-employee dyad and to a system of private ordering. Instead, it locates decisions about basic standards of employment at the sectoral level and positions unions as political actors empowered to advance the interests of workers generally. This new labor law, though nascent and uncertain, has the potential to salvage and secure one of labor law's most fundamental commitments – to help achieve greater equality, both economic and political – in the context of the twenty-first century economy.