South By North Strategies, Ltd.

John Cassidy of The New Yorker thinks about what the Obama administration can do to support the American labor movement.

By issuing some more rulings favorable to the unions over the next four years, the N.L.R.B. will help tilt the balance of power in the workplace back towards labor. But after many years in which employers were allowed to flout the law and intimidate union organizers with impunity, nobody in the labor movement is under any illusion that these administrative changes will be sufficient to reverse the unions’ historic decline. Indeed, even some economists who are sympathetic to unions believe that their decline is irreversible. In large parts of the country, particularly in the private sector, unions are no longer a major player in the economy. Changing that is going to take much more than two terms of Obama in the White House. But if he is serious about pursuing a liberal agenda, he can’t avoid getting involved.