A Call out of Seir: The Meaning and Future of US Labor Law

Abstract

The Cambridge Handbook of US Labor Law for the Twenty-First Century decries federal labor law for forsaking American workers and undermining American unions. Its contributors seek a reformed labor law for the current century. In this review essay, I examine the handbook’s contention that federal labor law has failed. To assess the merits of the claim, we must test the foundations of its contributors’ assumptions—about the labor movement, about the place of the labor movement in the political economy of American capitalism envisaged by labor law, and, indeed, about law itself. To do so, I turn to earlier, critical research on the character of American labor laws, notably Joel Rogers’s seminal 1990 essay “Divide and Conquer,” and also to work of my own. To put it crudely, I ask how much labor law reform actually matters.