We Have a Choice to Make

May 1 was International Workers’ Day, and it felt particularly potent this year. I swear I could hear the ring of freedom.  

Across the country in our cities and towns, families and friends, neighbors and strangers came together on May Day to refuse business as usual and demand respect for working people—respect that is owed to Black and brown folks especially, respect that can only be delivered through new norms, new institutions, and new forms of power. Community leaders of massive coalitions like May Day Strong didn’t ask for permission to act on a claim generations in the making: that our democracy and economy are for workers not billionaires, for people, not profits. 

There’s defiance in that truth, an open and explicit refusal to accept the status quo—the policies governing our workplaces, the systems controlling our finances, and the societal assumptions and expectations limiting our self-determination. The wealthy and powerful have taken advantage of the relationship between economic and political power and created a vicious cycle in which they simultaneously influence our government’s decisions and benefit from them materially. All the while, the rest of us are perpetually in a cycle of harm. 

The daily hardships that so many Americans are forced to endure were especially evident on May Day. The anger and grief. The exhaustion. The worry. 

But it was the will of the people—echoed in chants of collective hope for something better, demonstrated through a nationwide general strike—that felt the most palpable. As I wrote last November, it will be us, the people, who disrupt the vicious cycle we’re in and turn it virtuous.  

Now, the contemporary progressive movement must decide: Is worker power just a labor issue, or is it a collective answer to the most urgent democracy crisis of our time?  

The Cycle of Economic and Political Disempowerment 

Concentrated wealth produces concentrated political influence, which produces policies that further concentrate wealth, and on and on, each turn of the cycle making the next harder to break. 

Today, jobs are growing in sectors that pay low wages and offer unpredictable, inconsistent, and frankly undervalued, work. Black and Latina women are being pushed out of the economy, as usual, experiencing higher unemployment rates than everyone else. CEOs are in charge of our most vital financial institutions, such as the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), while corporations continue to pay next to nothing on Tax Day. In a single year, the Trump administration stripped collective bargaining rights from more than 1 million federal workers, and it hasn’t stopped there.  

Policy after policy, cycle after cycle, working people are shown that their labor is a commodity, not a contribution, and that they will only be laborers, not “full citizens” who are able to influence the democratic and economic systems that shape their lives. 

Workers today, particularly low-income workers, are being pushed out of economic and political life—disempowered on the job, at the bank, and at the ballot.

Workers today, particularly low-income workers, are being pushed out of economic and political life—disempowered on the job, at the bank, and at the ballot. Suppressed wages mean less time, fewer resources, and less capacity to engage politically and actually invest in civic life. Political disengagement means that the people making decisions about labor law, tax policy, and who gets to organize and who doesn’t, who gets to vote and who doesn’t, are the same people who benefit from keeping workers disempowered.  

Round and round, it goes. 

Wielding Worker Power as a New Form of Democratic Power 

To entirely demolish the architectural and systemic exploitation that is the U.S. labor market, we have to be sure that the people relegated to the bottom of the economic hierarchy build the political power they were promised. 

It will take three things to rebuild labor power as a new form of democratic power: a significant shift in cultural norms, a complete overhaul of many of our core institutions, and a reimagined design for how power moves. 

First, we need new norms. We need a society that ensures that every person who works receives a living wage and that they also have a genuine voice in how that work is structured and valued. For too long, the wealthy, white minority has used its power and influence to shape the labor market into something that favors employers and corporate interests. Much of society has accepted the notion that working people should be grateful for whatever the market provides.  

Second, we need new institutions. Backed by a unified set of demands that transcends industry and identity, we need new, formal structures that give workers co-governance over the conditions of their labor, regardless of whether they work  on the assembly line, in the gig economy, or as a care provider in someone’s home. Everyone should be able to rely on the protection of government institutions and collective action. To achieve this, employers must face real penalties when they violate workers’ rights, they must be held accountable for their actions toward every worker they employ, regardless of how they describe the work arrangement, and the institutions that govern the formation of unions must be strengthened so that they speak to the needs of those who labor under the structures and conditions of today’s economy. 

Third, we need new forms of power. We can harness a level of people power that won’t stay down. It will travel, from the bargaining table into the political sphere where cultural norms are defined, into the policy space where the economic rules are written, and into the communities where working people live. 

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We’re soon expected to celebrate 250 years of America, whose foundational failings have kept its promise out of reach for too many. I love my country. I really do. But I care more about its people, and we are being deprived of the ability to make our own choices in the shaping of our everyday lives, at work and at home.  

The Dēmos—the people—are in the streets and at the table. They’re leading protests and mutual-aid drives, running contract negotiations and co-governance experiments. These radical citizens are doing the most essential work there is: insisting that their labor, time, and lives belong to them. 

Our job—at Dēmos and as a movement—is to provide the infrastructure and resources that the people need to build upon and sustain that power.  

To everyone who showed up for May Day: I see you. Dēmos has your back.  Now let’s show them that we aren’t just fighting for a better deal—we’re making way for a better democracy.