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