Workers' Rights and the Distributive Constitution

Progressives have forgotten how to think about the constitutional dimensions of economic life. Work, livelihood, and opportunity; material security and insecurity; poverty and dependency; union organizing, collective bargaining, and workplace democracy: for generations of American reformers, the constitutional importance of these subjects was self-evident. Laissez-faire, unchecked corporate power, and the deprivations and inequalities they bred were not just bad public policy—they were constitutional infirmities. Today, with the exception of employment discrimination, such concerns have vanished from progressives' constitutional landscape.