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American labor law was designed to ensure equal bargaining power between workers and employers. But workers' collective power against increasingly dominant employers has disintegrated. With union density at an abysmal 6.2 percent in the private sector—a level unequaled since the Great Depression—the vast majority of workers depend only on individual negotiations with employers to lift stagnant wages and ensure upward economic mobility. But decentralized, individual bargaining is not enough. Economists and legal scholars increasingly agree that, absent regulation to protect workers' collective rights, labor markets naturally strengthen employers' bargaining power over workers. Existing labor and antitrust law have failed to step in, leaving employers free to coordinate and consolidate labor-market power while constraining workers' ability to do the same. The dissolution of workers' collective rights has resulted in spiking income inequality: workers have suffered economy-wide wage stagnation and a declining share of the national income for decades. To resolve this crisis, some scholars have advocated for ambitious labor law reforms, like sector-wide bargaining, while others have turned to antitrust law to tackle employer power. While these proposals are vital, they overlook an existing opportunity already contained in the labor law that would avoid the political and doctrinal obstacles to such large-scale reforms. This Article argues for a "structural" approach to the labor law that revives and modernizes its equal bargaining power purpose through deploying innovative social scientific analysis. A "structural" approach is one that takes into account workers' bargaining power relative to employers in determining the scope of substantive labor rights and in resolving disputes. Because employers' current buyer power strengthens their ability to indefinitely hold out on worker demands in the employment bargain, the "structural" approach seeks to deploy social scientific tools to tailor the labor law's provisions so that they resituate workers to a bargaining position from which they could equally hold out. This Article makes three key contributions. First, it documents the dispersion and misalignment of workers' collective rights under current labor law, detailing the historical narrowing of workers' collective rights to limited tactics by a small set of workers against highly protected individual enterprises and the concomitant rise of employer power (Part I). Second, it introduces and schematizes the wealth of social scientific literature relevant for evaluating the relative bargaining power of employers and employees (Part II). And finally, it offers concrete proposals for how to apply these social scientific tools and insights to three areas of the National Labor Relation Board's adjudication and regulatory authority: the determination of "employer"/"employee" status, the determination of employees' substantive rights under section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), and the determination of what counts as sanctionable unfair labor practices under section 8 of the NLRA (Part III).

After 9/11, Congress, federal agencies, and scholars exposed the devastating results of the national security agencies' failure to coordinate. The financial crisis has been linked to similar coordination failures in the context of interagency banking regulation, with jurisdictional gaps and blind spots resulting in failure to prevent a global recession. But despite Gilded Age-levels of inequality, little attention has focused on the failures of interagency coordination to secure Americans' access to economic opportunity through work—whether through securing higher wages and higher union density, coordinating government enforcement to achieve redistributive goals and combat consolidation of employer buyer power, or overcoming systemic abuses in employers' wage theft, discrimination, and worker mistreatment. The crippling spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic demands that now, more than ever, agencies coordinate in their regulation of labor markets to accomplish micro– and macroeconomic policy goals. This Essay is a component of a larger project that seeks to document federal agencies' selective coordination along six core policy vectors that impact work- or income-based avenues towards equality—macroeconomic, microeconomic, institution-building, industry-specific, anti-subordination, and democratic/expressive policy. It presents the results of a novel data set collecting and systematizing existing Memoranda of Understanding (MOUs) authorized by the core agencies involved in labor market regulation: the Department of Labor (DOL), its sub agencies, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the Department of Justice-Antitrust Division, and the Federal Trade Commission. By hand-coding and analyzing the 112 discoverable MOUs from the 1950s to the present, the Essay presents a novel history of interagency coordination on labor regulation, highlighting which labor agencies coordinate most and least, what such coordination facilitates as a substantive and administrative matter, and the broad scope and areas of labor market regulation on which coordination has not yet occurred. It concludes by arguing that the federal government lacks a coherent, aligned vision on labor market regulation and economic mobility through work, and proposes next steps for improving agency coordination.

President Biden's recent Executive Order on Promoting Competition brought much-needed attention to labor market concentration, employer collusion, and abusive employment contracts that suppress wages and diminish labor's share of national income. But while the Order recognized the necessity of a "whole-of-government" approach to employers' monopsony power over workers, it could go further to more fully tackle the sources of that power and mobilize the collective resources of government to combat them.