What Have We Learned? The Bargain That Built the Middle Class The American middle class was built through a series of negotiated agreements about what employers owed workers, what workers owed firms, and which responsibilities belonged to the government instead of business. Many of those agreements were designed for an industrial economy dominated by large, stable employers. Today, AI, platform work, and the fragmentation of employment are testing whether that model can still

Last month, we addressed the New Deal. This legislature is often remembered as the moment America decided workers deserved protection, but hidden inside the architecture Frances Perkins helped build was a devastating compromise. This was a trap door through which millions of workers fell through. Agricultural and domestic, disproportionately Black and immigrant workers, were excluded from the very laws meant to protect them. Nearly one hundred years later, the consequences of

Last year we wrote that reducing immigration as called for by Project 2025 and supported by the Trump Administration would weaken the economy by shrinking consumer demand and reducing tax revenue. At the time, it felt like a minority position. The latest estimates about migration and labor supply from the U.S. Census Bureau are alarming. Net international migration has collapsed from 2.7 million people in 2024 to 1.3 million in 2025, a 54% plunge in a single year. The project

One Person, One List, One Rewrite Last month we covered the bloodiest era in American labor history. Haymarket. Homestead. Pullman. The Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Workers died in the streets, in factories, on railroad tracks. Each tragedy produced outrage. Some produced commissions. A few produced laws. But one produced a notable woman: Frances Perkins. Perkins produced the architecture of the modern employer-employee compact in America. Social Security, the minimum wage, the