Lane Windham. Knocking on Labor’s Door

Economists and pundits who should know better often ask why, after the economy rebounded from the 2007–2009 Great Recession, profits and incomes for the top 1 percent have skyrocketed but wages for most American workers have remained flat or have fallen. The answer to this question is spelled out clearly by Lane Windham in Knocking on Labor’s Door: the wholesale destruction of unions and worker rights. President Ronald Reagan led the attacks in the 1980s that, combined with corporate off-shoring of production to even cheaper labor abroad, undermined the power of most American workers to improve their wages. Business and the Republican Right largely destroyed legal and economic protections and frameworks created by generations of progressives from President Franklin Roosevelt to Martin Luther King Jr. The dream of a robust economy that provides livable wages, safe and reasonable working conditions, access to health care, housing, education, social security, and social welfare benefits has been shattered by a corporate and right-wing political assault against “everything decent and fair in American life,” as King once put it (quoted in Michael K. Honey, To the Promised Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice [2018], 64).

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