Knight: Unions offer balance to conservatives, progressives
In The Atlantic, Jonathan Rauch recalls a 2016 brunch with conservative Eli Lehrer, who runs Washington’s Republican-leaning R Street Institute, and Andy Stern, former president of the Service Employees International Union.
“Lehrer believes the time has come for the American Right to reconsider its decades-long war on unions,” Rauch says. “Their collapse, he says, has fueled the growth of government and of the welfare state, which has stepped in to regulate workplaces and provide job security as unions have died out.
“Stern thinks unions cannot survive unless they innovate and change, but laws intended to protect and preserve them get in the way,” Rauch adds.
The journal National Affairs this summer published Lehrer and Stern’s essay about the need for change. In “How to Modernize Labor Law,” the two write, “The fundamental federal rules governing employer-worker relations were written for a different era.”
