Recent economic data suggest labor shortages in leisure and hospitality have popped up—but there is little reason to worry about spillover into the rest of the economy and no reason to change policy course.

Yes, last week’s jobs report was disappointing, with employment growth slowing significantly from the months before. It would be a mistake, however, to make too much of a single month’s data—the monthly jobs report data are notoriously volatile, and there are still excellent reasons to believe that coming months will see very strong job gains. Further, as disappointing as last week’s report was, there is nothing in it that demands a reorientation of the general policy stance taken by the federal government. The relief and recovery aid already passed (including the boosts to unemployment insurance) should be continued, and proposed packages (like the American Families Plan and the American Jobs Plan) should be passed.

The argument that last week’s report demands a rethink of today’s policy orientation rests on claims that it contained clear evidence of damaging labor shortages induced by either too-extensive stimulus or too-generous unemployment insurance (UI).

There is not compelling evidence of either of these. In fact, nothing in last week’s jobs report calls for a wholesale change of policy course from the federal government. The key takeaways from the data are:

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Mother’s Day is, at its core, about care. When we select Hallmark cards and order flower deliveries, we’re honoring the care provided by moms and other maternal figures. This Mother’s Day, though, marks more than a year into a pandemic that threw the disparities in our care system into stark relief. Women left the workforce in staggering numbers to attend to COVID-related caregiving responsibilities at home. This was disruptive for individual families and the economy at large.

So this year, while of course we should celebrate our mothers, there’s much more to be done. Honoring our caregivers goes beyond individual gestures; it calls for a sweeping investment in care workers and services.

Care isn’t a burden for women and families to shoulder alone. It’s the foundation of our economy, and it deserves to be treated as such. For the tens of millions of workers with care responsibilities related to, for example, young children or elderly parents, having stable, high-quality care services available is what makes it possible for them to hold a job. Put simply, care services are needed for the functioning of our modern labor market.

Workers with care responsibilities need a strong care system in place in order to participate in the workforce. As it stands, our care infrastructure is fragmented and inadequate, which cuts off opportunities for millions of workers. The burdens of our inadequate care infrastructure disproportionately fall on women, who still perform the bulk of care work in this country. Those care burdens are a primary cause of low labor force participation among prime age women in the U.S. relative to our peer countries around the world, even before the pandemic. Poor care infrastructure comes at great economic costs.

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When the April jobs report comes out tomorrow from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, I expect another month of strong job growth. Progress on the production and distribution of the vaccine, as well as forthcoming aid to state and local governments and direct assistance to workers and their families, means that the labor market should pick up steam. And that’s much needed, because the U.S. economy is still facing a significant jobs shortfall between 9.1 million and 11.0 million jobs, as I show below.

As of the latest March 2021 data, employment is down 8.4 million jobs from its pre-pandemic level in February 2020. In addition, thousands of jobs would have been added each month over the last year without the pandemic recession.

I consider two plausible counterfactuals for how many jobs may have been created if the recession hadn’t hit, as shown in the figure below. First, we could simply add enough jobs to keep up with population growth. There was a noticeable slowdown in ages 16+ population growth early in the pandemic; however, on average, we still would have needed a minimum of 54,000 jobs a month just to keep up with that growth.

Alternatively, we could count how many jobs may have been added if we took pre-recession growth in payroll employment and extended that forward. Average monthly job growth over the 12 months prior the recession was 202,000. Using these reasonable counterfactuals, we are now short between 9.1 million and 11.0 million jobs since February 2020. When the latest job numbers are released tomorrow, we should not only look at the difference in jobs between now and February 2020, but also what could have been if the economy continued growing over the last year.

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Update: Data released following the publication of this piece show there are signs of short-term worker shortages in isolated sectors, namely leisure and hospitality. There is, however, no evidence of a widespread labor shortage, and the isolated shortages that do exist are not a reason for concern. See this blog post for an updated analysis.)

This op-ed was originally published for The Commons hosted by the Initiative for Policy Dialogue. Read the piece here. 

There are lots of anecdotal reports swirling around about employers who can’t find workers. Just search “worker shortages” online and a seemingly endless list of stories pops up, so it’s easy to assume there’s an alarming lack of people to fill jobs. But a closer look reveals there may be a lot less to this than meets the eye.

First, the backdrop. In good times and bad, there is always a chorus of employers who claim they can’t find the employees they need. Sometimes that chorus is louder, sometimes softer, but it’s always there. One reason is that in a system as large and complex as the U.S. labor market there will always be pockets of bona fide labor shortages at any given time. But a more common reason is employers simply don’t want to raise wages high enough to attract workers. Employers post their too-low wages, can’t find workers to fill jobs at that pay level, and claim they’re facing a labor shortage. Given the ubiquity of this dynamic, I often suggest that whenever anyone says, “I can’t find the workers I need,” she should really add, “at the wages I want to pay.”

Furthermore, a job opening when the labor market is weak often does not mean the same thing as a job opening when the labor market is strong. There is a wide range of “recruitment intensity” that an employer can apply to an open position. For example, if employers are trying hard to fill an opening, they will increase the compensation package and perhaps scale back the required qualifications. Conversely, if employers are not trying very hard, they may offer a meager compensation package and hike up the required qualifications. Perhaps unsurprisingly, research shows that recruitment intensity is cyclical. It tends to be stronger when the labor market is strong, and weaker when the labor market is weak. This means that when a job opening goes unfilled when the labor market is weak, as it is today, employers are even more likely than in normal times to be holding out for an overly qualified candidate at a very cheap price.

This points to the fact that the footprint of a bona fide labor shortage is rising wages. Employers who truly face shortages of suitable, interested workers will respond by bidding up wages to attract those workers, and employers whose workers are being poached will raise wages to retain their workers, and so on. When you don’t see wages growing to reflect that dynamic, you can be fairly certain that labor shortages, though possibly happening in some places, are not a driving feature of the labor market.

And right now, wages are not growing at a rapid pace. While there are issues with measuring wage growth due to the unprecedented job losses of the pandemic, wage series that account for these issues are not showing an increase in wage growth. Unsurprisingly, at a recent press conference, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell dismissed anecdotal claims of labor market shortages, saying, “We don’t see wages moving up yet. And presumably we would see that in a really tight labor market.”

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In the first 100 days, the Biden-Harris administration has taken a number of promising steps toward crafting an economic policy approach that would boost living standards and security for all U.S. families. But much remains to be done.

In this post, we highlight—in very broad strokes—what is needed to build an economy that generates faster, more sustainable, and more equitably distributed growth. We then identify where the administration has made progress in the first 100 days and where more forceful action is needed.

Building an economy that works for everyone requires the following:

• Pursuing a “go-for-growth” approach to macroeconomics that aims for labor markets where jobs are plentiful and employers have to work hard (including offering higher wages) to attract workers, so-called “high-pressure” labor markets.
• Crafting and enforcing fairer rules for markets, particularly through labor market institutions and standards that provide workers a more level playing field when bargaining with employers for better pay and working conditions.
• Constructing deeper and more protective social insurance systems that use a larger public role in providing unemployment benefits, health coverage, and retirement income security— including long-term care for older adults and people with disabilities.
• Undertaking ambitious public investments in both people and physical capital, including physical infrastructure, early child care and education, higher education, and green investments.
• Reforming taxes in a way that helps finance the needed fiscal spending in this program, curbs growing inequality, and discourages the economic “bads” of greenhouse gas emissions and financial speculation.

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Today the Biden-Harris administration issued an executive order requiring federal contractors to pay a minimum wage of $15 per hour. This is very welcome news. We estimate that up to 390,000 low-wage federal contractors will see a raise under this policy, with the average annual pay increase for affected year-round workers being up to $3,100. Roughly half of workers who would see a raise will be women and roughly half will be Black or Hispanic workers.

To arrive at these estimates, we first estimate the state- and industry-specific shares of federal contract employment using FY2020 federal contract obligations from USA Spending and input-output tables from 2019 Bureau of Labor Statistics employment requirements data. We then combined these results with the EPI Minimum Wage Simulation Model, assuming that the state- and industry-specific wage distributions for federal contractors are similar to the state- and industry-specific overall wage distributions. Following this methodology, we project that the policy will raise wages of up to 390,000 federal contractors in 2022. We say “up to” 390,000 to account for the fact that some workers who would otherwise be affected by a $15 minimum wage will already be receiving a higher wage as a result of the Davis-Bacon Act or the Service Contract Act. An extreme lower bound for the number of contract workers affected by this executive order after accounting for these other wage standards is 226,000. (This lower bound is generated by entirely excluding the construction industry and, outside of construction, raising the underlying wage distribution by an industry-specific union wage premium.)

We are thrilled that the administration is increasing the minimum wage for workers on federal contracts to $15 per hour and raising wages for hundreds of thousands of workers, and we encourage the administration to go further to help ensure that the estimated two million total jobs held by federal contract workers are good jobs. This would include steps like ending practices that allow low-road contractors to win bids that are so low they are inconsistent with decent pay and working conditions, and banning federal government contractors from requiring contract workers to sign forced arbitration and class action waivers, which limit the ability of these workers to challenge illegal practices.

Recently released data from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) show that unemployment insurance (UI) made up an unprecedented share of total wage and salary income1 in 2020—reflecting the immense economic fallout from the pandemic and the large federal response to the crisis.

Importantly, more than 70% of UI dollars during the pandemic have come from emergency federal programs to prop up the inadequate state-run UI systems, revealing the gross inadequacy of existing UI benefits, the scale of the ambitious but temporary federal response, and the resulting obvious need for broad structural reform of the UI system. Key findings are:

• Nationally, UI benefits as a share of total wage and salary income peaked at over 10% in the second quarter of 2020. Before 2020, UI benefits had never been as high as 3% of total wage and salary income.
• At the state level, UI benefits had never exceeded 6% of any state’s wage and salary income before 2020. But in the second quarter of 2020, four states saw UI benefits exceed 20% of state wage and salary income.
• State UI programs could not meet the needed support for an unprecedented number of unemployed workers. Two key pieces of federal legislation helped fill the gap. The Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation (FPUC)—mostly the extra $600 in weekly benefits included as part of the CARES Act in March 2020—contributed the most federal dollars in 2020. But the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program (which expanded eligibility to workers traditionally left out of UI benefits) was also hugely important. In 13 states, PUA accounted for more than 45% of total UI dollars received in the fourth quarter of 2020.
• These pandemic-related UI programs greatly equalized the protectiveness of the UI system as a whole across groups. In particular, states with a higher share of Black residents were more reliant on federal assistance to provide UI benefits. But if the pandemic programs fade with no structural reforms, the UI system will revert to being one that sees stingier benefits precisely in those states with higher Black population shares. This disparate racial impact is a key reason why reforms are needed.

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It has been my honor, privilege, and joy to lead the Economic Policy Institute for the last three and a half years. For me, EPI has been a vibrant intellectual community for more than 30 years. I wandered in the door as an inexperienced trade economist in the 1990s, consumed and distributed EPI’s excellent research during the 20 years I was at the AFL-CIO, and then became president of EPI in 2018.

During my tenure, with the invaluable partnership of Vice President John Schmitt, EPI has grown its staff, expanded its work, strengthened its voice and impact, forged new partnerships, deepened its state policy work via the EARN network, and sharpened its focus on racial justice through expansion of the Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy, as well as throughout our work.

So it is with a heavy heart that I announce that I will be leaving EPI on May 7. I have accepted a job in the Biden/Harris administration. It is not easy to leave an organization like EPI—and the extraordinarily brilliant, insightful, and delightful staff—but I believe there is a short window that provides an opportunity for me to contribute to work I care deeply about.

I have complete, unshakable confidence in EPI, its staff, and its work. I know how valuable, timely, and thoughtful that work has been and will continue to be—especially now. EPI is well positioned to shape and inform the bold, ambitious policy agenda laid out by the new administration and Congress.

EPI’s wonderful board of directors, led by Board Chairman Richard Trumka and the executive committee, will organize a national search for the next president, who will have the good fortune to lead this stellar organization on to do the Research that builds Worker Power so we can achieve Justice. For the duration of the search, John Schmitt has generously and graciously agreed to step in as interim president. With his deep experience, John will ensure a smooth and successful transition.

I know EPI will continue to advance its mission to strengthen workers’ voice and power at the workplace and beyond and to make the world fairer and more humane. I will be eternally grateful that I had the opportunity to work alongside EPI’s amazing staff, and I look forward to staying connected in this next chapter for me and for EPI.

(On May 10, Thea Lee joined the U.S. Department of Labor as Deputy Undersecretary of Labor to lead International Labor Affairs Bureau.)

In all of the coverage about how Amazon and its relentless anti-union campaign defeated the union organizing drive at its fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama, one key feature of Amazon’s campaign deserves highlighting—namely, Amazon’s countless tactics to try and delay the vote and dilute the union’s support by adding thousands of workers to the bargaining unit who hadn’t previously been involved in the organizing drive. This common tactic, which is straight out of the standard union avoidance playbook, unquestionably played a significant role in defeating the organizing drive. Yet the tactic is perfectly legal under our current labor law. The Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act would put a stop to this tactic and put voting decisions back in the hands of workers and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

First, some background. When workers want to form a union, they typically gather signatures on a petition or cards indicating their support for union representation. If workers and their union gather signatures from at least 30% of the group—known as the “bargaining unit”—the NLRB will process a petition for a representation election. The NLRB will hold a hearing on the petition and issue a decision setting an election date, the voting bloc, the method of voting (mail ballot or in person), and other details.

When employers are notified of an election petition, their first play when they want to defeat an organizing drive is to stall the election and give themselves time to campaign against the union, as Amazon did in Bessemer. A common employer tactic—and one employed by Amazon—is to use the NLRB hearing to argue that the voting bloc should be different from the group described by workers in their election petition. Typically, employers will argue that the voting bloc/bargaining unit should be larger than the one sought by workers, because employers know they can dilute the union’s support by adding workers who haven’t previously been involved in the organizing drive.

Employers slow down the process by asking for a hearing on the proposed bargaining unit, which can take weeks or even months. In the meantime, the employer holds mandatory meetings where workers are required to listen to anti-union speeches by the company. Employers hire professional “union avoidance” consultants, who are paid thousands of dollars a day to script and run anti-union campaigns. The longer the employer can delay, the longer the employer can run its campaign. Meanwhile, the union has no similar access to the facility to talk with workers about the benefits of organizing.

This is precisely what Amazon did in Bessemer. The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Workers Union (RWDSU) filed a petition with the NLRB on November 20, 2020, seeking an election to represent a unit of 1,500 full-time and part-time workers at the Bessemer fulfillment center. The petition excluded temporary and seasonal employees from the bargaining unit, which is typical, because these short-term employees do not have the same permanent attachment to the job as regular employees. If Amazon had not intervened, an election would likely have been held among the 1,500-person voting bloc in late December.

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I am the author of a book, The Color of Law, that disproves the myth of de facto segregation. In truth, we are residentially segregated, not naturally or from private bigotry, but primarily by racially explicit policies of federal, state, and local governments designed to prevent African Americans and whites from living as neighbors; these 20th-century policies were so powerful that they determine much of today’s residential, social, and economic inequality.

Because powerful government policy segregated us, racial boundaries violate the fifth, 13th, and 14th amendments. Our nation thus has a positive constitutional obligation to redress segregation with policies as intentional as those that segregated us.

The federal government made housing and homeownership critical to families’ economic stability and upward mobility. But we routinely excluded African Americans from government benefits that propelled whites into the middle class.

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Black workers disproportionately experienced the darkest side of 2020, both in terms of health and labor market outcomes—a reality that was not unexpected.

Researchers, advocates, and activists have spent years pointing out that Black Americans are more likely to have the health conditions that significantly increase the mortality rate of COVID-19 infection. We have known for years that Black American households have a fraction of the wealth that white American households do, meaning that in the event of an economic shock they would be less resilient, more likely to default on loans, and unable to draw upon savings to pay rent, possibly leading to evictions.

The last 50 years of labor market data have given us two recognizable facts:

1. The Black unemployment rate is consistently around double the white unemployment rate under normal economic conditions.
2. Black workers find employment more slowly, especially in the wake of an economic downturn.

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Correction: The first paragraph of this blog post has been updated with the correct overall consumer price index (CPI) in March 2021 of 2.6% and “core” measure of the CPI of 1.6%. The initial analysis had accidentally switched the two numbers. The numbers in Figure A remain the same.

Today, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that the overall consumer price index (CPI) in March 2021 was 2.6% higher than in March 2020, while the “core” measure of the CPI (which excludes volatile food and energy prices) was 1.6% higher than a year ago. Given that these are noticeable (if modest) increases over recent months’ year-over-year inflation rates, some might be tempted to argue that this data should make policymakers worry about economic “overheating” stemming from “too much” fiscal support provided in recent recovery legislation. This is clearly wrong, for a number of reasons:

• The data released today do not show that prices have risen rapidly since recovery legislation passed—instead they just show that prices plummeted during the near-total shutdown of large swaths of the economy a year ago in response to the COVID-19 shock.
  • Measured on an annualized basis from February 2020—before the COVID-19 economic shock—inflation in March 2021 was running at just 1.5%.
  • Measured since October—shortly before the $2.8 trillion in additional relief spending provided by legislation in December 2020 and the American Rescue Plan (ARP) in March—inflation is running at an annualized rate of 1.3%.

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The spending in the American Jobs Plan (AJP) is well targeted to meet several (but obviously not all) pressing social needs. Because so much of the spending is temporary and provides needed investments, there is no pressing economic need to “pay” for it with tax increases. Yet the tax provisions in the AJP are also smart and valuable. This post discusses some of the economics of the AJP, with a special focus on these tax provisions. Its main findings are:

• The bulk of these tax provisions undo some of the worst parts of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) passed in the first year of the Trump administration. Given this, to make the case that rolling back these parts of the TCJA will harm the U.S. economy, one has to believe that the passage of the TCJA benefited the U.S. economy. There is no evidence this is the case.
• The entire case for corporate tax cuts benefiting the U.S. economy hinges on the effects on business investment. But business investment growth in the two years following the TCJA’s passage (even before the COVID-19 shock) was cratering, not rising.
• The vast majority of new revenue that will be raised from the AJP tax provisions will come from taxing “excess profits”—profits accrued by virtue of monopoly or other privileged market positions. As such, this extra revenue will have little to no effect on economic decision-making and hence will not reduce business investment or economic growth more generally.
• Two “model-based” analyses of the AJP find very different things: Moody’s Analytics forecasts strong positive effects on economic growth over the next 10 years, while the Penn Wharton Budget Model forecasts very slight negative growth effects by 2030. The finding that the AJP might reduce economic growth rests on a number of bad assumptions: that the corporate tax changes will significantly affect economic decision-making and reduce investment; that the productivity gains stemming from public investment are small; that budget deficits will crowd out large amounts of private capital formation over the next decade; and that AJP’s care investments will reduce labor supply. None of these assumptions are likely to be correct.

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We need to raise the federal minimum wage. Its deterioration in value over the past five decades has exacerbated poverty, widened inequality, and lowered wages for the bottom third of wage earners1—despite the fact that these workers typically are older and have more education than their counterparts a generation ago.

One misguided critique of the effort to raise the federal minimum to $15 in 2025 is that there is a need to establish a regionally adjusted federal minimum wage set to local conditions. In fact, federal minimum wage policy has always provided for tailored standards, by coupling a strong national wage floor with the ability for cities and states to adopt higher standards. Our ability to set a national wage floor is much easier now than it was decades ago when lawmakers last raised the federal minimum wage to new heights. In 1968, when the federal minimum wage was lifted to its highest value in U.S. history and coverage of the law was vastly expanded, there were much larger differences in wage levels throughout the country. Yet, we now have empirical evidence that establishing this unprecedented, nationwide minimum wage did not have adverse employment impacts.

Today, the wage levels of lower-wage states, primarily Southern ones, are much closer to overall national wage levels, so there is even less validity to claims that the federal minimum wage must be lowered to accommodate certain areas. Moreover, the ‘bite’ of a $15 minimum wage in 2025—i.e., the share of workers and businesses impacted, and the magnitude of resulting wage increases—will be well within the range of recent experiences of minimum wage increases in states and localities that studies have shown had little, if any, impact on employment. The proposed increase to $15 by 2025 will lead to improved annual earnings for nearly all low-wage workers.

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Pursuing public health initiatives—including the production and distribution of the vaccine—is the most important priority for our health and economic well-being. Further, investments in state and local governments as well as direct assistance to workers and their families have been essential to their financial security and the economic recovery itself. Given advancements on both fronts in recent weeks and months, I expect the labor market recovery to finally pick up steam.

A year into the recession, the labor market is still down 9.5 million jobs from where it stood immediately before the COVID-19 shock. If we add in jobs that should have been created over that time to absorb new workers, we’re facing a jobs shortfall today of nearly 12 million jobs.

As the labor market finally picks up, the key indicators to watch are where the jobs are returning and for whom. The biggest deficit remains in leisure and hospitality, with 3.5 million fewer jobs relative to its February 2020 level. The economic pain caused by losses in this lowest-paying sector was enormous.

Meanwhile, public-sector employment—primarily education employment at the state and local level—remains 1.4 million jobs below pre-pandemic levels. I’m optimistic that the state and local relief that was part of the American Rescue Plan will provide tremendous support to this sector in terms of employment and the vital public services they provide.

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The U.S.’s largest temporary work visa program is the H-1B—an important program that allows U.S. employers to hire college-educated migrant workers. However, the H-1B program is not operating as intended and needs to be fixed: Instead of being used to fill genuine labor shortages in skilled occupations without negatively impacting U.S. labor standards, the latest data show that the H-1B’s biggest users are companies that have an outsourcing business model. President Joe Biden can and should implement regulations so that outsourcing companies can no longer exploit the program and to prevent them from underpaying skilled migrant workers.

Outsourcing companies exploit the H-1B program’s weaknesses to build and expand a business model based on outsourcing jobs from other companies. In this arrangement, rather than being employed directly by the outsourcing company that hired them, the outsourcer sends its H-1B workers to work for third-party clients, either on- or off-site. The aim of the outsourcing company is ultimately to move as much work as possible abroad to countries where labor costs are lower and profit margins are higher. The H-1B workers serve three purposes in this business model: to facilitate the transfer of jobs and tasks offshore; to coordinate offshore teams; and to serve as a lower cost alternative to hiring U.S. workers for on-site jobs. H-1B outsourcing companies also replace incumbent U.S. workers with H-1B workers and typically pay their H-1B workers the lowest wages permitted by law, far below market wage rates.

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In the wake of the mass shootings in Atlanta on March 16, we must unite to decry the unacceptable hate and discrimination directed toward Asian Americans. But beyond immediate support and a commitment to justice, the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community requires understanding and visibility. And this understanding—particularly with regard to their economic suffering from the pandemic—must be followed by policy, advocacy, and action.

The mass shootings that killed six women of Asian descent and two other people at Atlanta area spas have left the AAPI community in Atlanta and across the country in mourning and on high alert. While the man arrested for the murders has not yet been charged with a hate crime, the hate and discrimination being directed toward Asian Americans is an inescapable fact. According to Stop AAPI Hate, nearly 3,800 incidents targeting Asian-Americans were reported to the organization between mid-March 2020 and the end of February 2021. AAPI women were more than twice as likely to report hate incidents as men. And these incidents, which range from verbal harassment to civil rights violations to physical assault, “represent only a fraction of the number of hate incidents that actually occur,” a Stop AAPI Hate report said.

Advocates attribute the rise of hate and harassment of Asian Americans to the increasingly xenophobic language connecting the COVID-19 pandemic with Asian Americans. In reality, AAPI individuals are suffering under the pandemic, especially Asian American women.

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Today ends a seven-week union election voting period for workers at the Amazon fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama. If workers win a union, the results of the election will further energize the labor movement. If Amazon’s efforts at union avoidance prove successful, the election will serve as the most recent example of employers thwarting workers’ efforts to organize a union. Regardless of the outcome of the election, the coercion, intimidation, and retaliation workers at Amazon’s Bessemer facility have endured reveal a broken union election system.

Unfortunately, their experiences are far from unique—employers are charged with violating the law in 41.5% of all union elections supervised by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The numbers are worse for large employers, like Amazon, where more than half (54.4%) of employers are charged with violating the law.

We have only to look to the recovery from the Great Recession to know that reforming this system is critical to an equitable recovery now. Even though the unemployment rate ultimately got down to 3.5% in the recovery from the Great Recession, low- and middle-wage workers did not get a fair share of that economic growth. If policymakers do not address our nation’s broken labor law system, then they will be the architects of an economy marked by continued inequality and injustice. This moment is an opportunity to prioritize policies that enable working people to have agency over their working lives and win both economic and democratic reforms for themselves and their co-workers.

The Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act addresses many of the major shortcomings with our current law. Specifically, it would institute meaningful penalties for private-sector employers that coerce and intimidate workers seeking to unionize—as has been clearly documented in the Amazon organizing campaign in Bessemer.

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In California, union organizers can temporarily access an agricultural employer’s property outside of work hours in order to talk to farmworkers about their legally protected right to join a union. Two agricultural employers, however, contend that the regulation allowing that access is equivalent to an uncompensated and unconstitutional “taking” of their property and should therefore be struck down.

On Monday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in this dispute: In Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid, two agricultural employers are challenging the 1975 California regulation that allows union representatives to visit private farms. The case could have implications for union organizing across the country.

If the challenge by the employers is successful, it will keep the United Farm Workers (UFW) away from their employees, so they won’t be able to organize them. Such a restriction would be particularly egregious given the harsh working conditions farmworkers face and given that a growing share are temporary migrant workers with H-2A visas who live in housing that is either owned or controlled by their employers.

Farmworkers are employed in one of the most hazardous and lowest paying jobs in the entire U.S. labor market, a fact that isn’t often mentioned in the mainstream coverage. As research I coauthored has shown, farmworkers suffer very high rates of wage and hour violations, yet the number of inspections of agricultural employers has been cut in half in recent years, likely due to the U.S. Department of Labor being perennially underfunded by Congress. Since farmworkers are one of the most vulnerable groups in the U.S. workforce, they would benefit enormously from joining a union.

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Lately, we have seen criticism of the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act centered on what the bill will mean for independent contractors and freelancers.

Despite the fearmongering by business interests and some freelancer groups, the PRO Act will not destroy the gig economy.

Here are three reasons why:

The PRO Act is about giving workers a voice, not taking away freedom.

The PRO Act would expand collective bargaining rights for workers. It would not force any worker to give up their gig or freelance work.

The Act would expand protections under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) to more workers. The NLRA is an 85-year-old law that protects workers’ right to join together to form unions or to engage in concerted efforts to ensure better working conditions. When Congress passed the NLRA it was to “encourage collective bargaining, and to curtail certain private sector labor and management practices, which can harm the general welfare of workers, businesses, and the U.S. economy.” The NLRA only covers “employees,” so workers who are deemed independent contractors are not covered, which leads us to the next point.

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