During their heyday in the New Deal and the postwar era, unions did much more than negotiate and enforce contracts. They also represented workers in politics and civil society, acting as a standing check on corporate power. In that capacity, unions helped deliver higher minimum wages, workplace safety laws, higher income taxes on top earners, and limits to executive compensation. In large part as a result of unions’ efforts, the postwar era was the only sustained period in the history of capitalism when productivity gains were shared widely. With the decline of unions, accordingly, workers and the broader polity have suffered a quadruple blow: deteriorating working conditions, greater economic inequality, less economic mobility, and dominance of our politics by wealthy interests. Matters only stand to get worse after the Supreme Court’s 2018 decision in Janus v. AFSCME, which held that public sector unions cannot require represented workers to defray their costs of representation and grievance arbitration through “fair share” fees. Parallel state laws covering private sector workers have been shown to depress voter turnout among workers, to discourage working class candidates from running for office, and to push state policy “in a more conservative direction.”