Reconstructing America's Social Contract in Employment: The Role of Policy, Institutions, and Practices

The primary challenge facing labor and employment policy in the next decade is to reconstruct the social contract between the American workforce and employers in ways that address the needs and realities of a modern economy and society. To do so the country will need to modernize the labor and employment policies carried over from the New Deal era and foster innovations in labor unions, labor market institutions, corporations, and in their relationships. Unfortunately, the political will to take on this task is absent at the national level of policy making and political discourse. Instead, the past two decades have been characterized by failed efforts at incremental reforms in labor policy, starting with the 1977 labor law reform debate and more recently illustrated by the failure of the Dunlop Commission to break the political impasse over labor and employment policy. The result is that analysis and debates over these issues have been marginalized as “special interest politics.”