By Sam Ben-Meir*
NEW YORK | 9 September 2026 (IDN) — Every Labor Day, Americans perform a familiar ritual. Politicians praise the dignity of work. Corporations thank their employees. Newspapers recall the struggles of the labor movement. Families mark the unofficial end of summer with barbecues and a final long weekend. Then Tuesday arrives, and tens of millions of Americans return to workplaces over which they exercise remarkably little control.
They may elect a president, a governor, a mayor, a senator. They may vote on referenda and school boards. They are told from childhood that legitimate authority derives from the consent of the governed. But for eight or ten hours a day, five days a week, most enter institutions in which this principle largely disappears.
Their schedules may be altered. Their workloads may increase. Their jobs may be eliminated. Their workplaces may be reorganized, monitored, automated, relocated or closed. Decisions affecting their income, security, health and future are routinely made by people they did not elect and frequently have no meaningful power to challenge.
We call ourselves a democracy. But democracy stops at the workplace door. This is the contradiction that Labor Day should force us to confront. The problem is not that we fail to appreciate workers sufficiently. The problem is that ceremonial appreciation can obscure a much more uncomfortable fact: American workers remain profoundly unequal to those who exercise economic power over them. Indeed, Labor Day itself risks becoming a ritual of recognition without power.
When Productivity and Workers’ Pay Parted Ways
The economic story of the past half-century is by now difficult to dispute, even if its meaning remains fiercely contested. For several decades after World War II, productivity and workers’ compensation rose roughly together. As workers became more productive, their compensation increased correspondingly. Beginning in the late 1970s, however, the two began to separate dramatically.
According to the Economic Policy Institute’s latest calculations, net productivity increased 93.2 percent between the final quarter of 1979 and the first quarter of 2026, while the hourly compensation of production and nonsupervisory workers increased only 33.7 percent. Productivity, in other words, has risen nearly three times as much as workers’ pay. The divergence reflects both increasing wage inequality and a shift of income toward capital owners.
The point is not that workers have received nothing from economic growth. They plainly have. Nor does every gap between productivity and wages constitute exploitation by itself. The more important question is where the gains generated by increasing productivity have gone and who possesses the power to determine their distribution.
The distribution of wealth provides part of the answer. Federal Reserve data for the first quarter of 2026 reveal an extraordinary concentration of financial ownership. The top 10 percent of households held roughly $48 trillion in corporate equities and mutual-fund shares; the bottom half held less than $600 billion. This matters because ownership is not simply wealth. Ownership is power.
Those who own productive assets exercise influence over investment, corporate priorities, employment and the distribution of the surplus generated by economic activity. Workers participate in creating that surplus, but they generally possess little institutional authority over what becomes of it. The familiar discussion of economic inequality therefore does not go far enough. Inequality is not simply a question of who gets how much. It is a question of who decides.
Nowhere is the contradiction clearer than in American attitudes toward organized labor. Gallup’s newest polling, released just days before this Labor Day, found that 71 percent of Americans approve of labor unions, tying the highest level Gallup has recorded since the 1960s. Even more strikingly, 47 percent say they want unions to have more influence—the highest figure Gallup has recorded on that question in a quarter century—compared with only 23 percent who want unions to have less. Majorities of Democrats, independents and, for only the second time in the past quarter century, Republicans approve of unions.
Yet union membership remains extraordinarily low by historical standards. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 10 percent of American wage and salary workers belonged to unions in 2025. In 1983, the earliest year for which directly comparable BLS figures are available, the figure was 20.1 percent. In the private sector today, union membership stands at just 5.9 percent. There is consequently an extraordinary gap between what Americans appear to want and the institutions through which that desire could be expressed.
And unions matter materially. In 2025, full-time union members had median weekly earnings of $1,404, compared with $1,174 for nonunion workers. These raw figures do not control for occupation, industry and other differences, so they should not be interpreted as the causal effect of unionization. But they remind us that collective organization remains associated with substantially greater bargaining power. Still, stronger unions, necessary as they are, should not represent the outer limit of our political imagination. The deeper question is why economic institutions themselves remain so profoundly undemocratic.
Why Does Democracy Stop at the Workplace Door?
There is something peculiar about American democracy. We insist that people subject to power should have a voice in its exercise. Then millions of us go to work and leave that principle at the door. Imagine a country organized like the typical workplace. A small group owns the institution, selects its leadership and makes the rules. Everyone else may complain—or leave—but possesses little inherent right to participate in governing it. We would not call this democracy. At work, we call it management.
A corporation is not a state, of course, and employees are formally free to leave. But exit is not democracy. Moving from one hierarchy to another is not self-government. The freedom to choose one’s ruler is a strangely impoverished definition of freedom. This raises a question more fundamental than whether workers are paid enough: Why should ownership confer the right to govern while labor does not? We abolished the property qualification for political citizenship long ago. Yet something resembling it survives in economic life: ownership gives you a vote; working there usually does not. Perhaps, then, we have been asking the wrong question. The question is not whether democracy belongs in the workplace. The question is why we ever accepted that it did not.
Here the problem becomes philosophical. Modern economic thought has encouraged us to understand employment primarily as an exchange. One party possesses capital. Another possesses labor power. The worker agrees to provide labor for a specified period, and the employer agrees to provide wages. Provided the contract is voluntary, we are inclined to call the relationship free. But this conception of freedom is radically impoverished.
Human beings are not isolated proprietors who encounter one another only to exchange things they already possess. Our capacities develop through social relations. Our independence depends upon forms of dependence. Our freedom becomes real through institutions that allow us to participate in shaping the conditions under which we live with others.
Freedom, in other words, requires recognition. This is why political democracy matters in the first place. Voting is not sacred because periodically placing a mark beside someone’s name possesses some intrinsic metaphysical value. Democracy matters because people should not merely be objects of decisions made by others. They should participate, however imperfectly, in determining the institutions governing their common lives.
Why should this principle suddenly become irrelevant when we arrive at work? For most adults, work occupies an enormous portion of waking life. It structures when we wake, where we live, how much time we spend with our children, whether we can afford medical treatment, when we can retire and what kind of future we can imagine. Yet we continue to treat the workplace as though it belonged to a pre-democratic realm.
The strongest objection to workplace democracy deserves to be taken seriously. Owners invested the capital, the argument runs. Entrepreneurs created the company. Investors assumed financial risk. Because their property is at stake, they are entitled to determine how the enterprise is governed. There is something legitimate in this argument. Capital investment is real. Risk is real. Entrepreneurship and innovation deserve recognition and reward.
But why should capital be the only contribution that creates a claim to governance? Workers invest as well. They invest their skills. They invest years acquiring expertise. They invest physical and intellectual energy. They build relationships with colleagues and customers. They may move their families, organize their lives around particular schedules, or spend decades developing knowledge specific to an enterprise. Above all, they invest something no corporation can ever return to them. They invest portions of their lives.
The median American wage and salary worker had been with their employer for 3.9 years when the Bureau of Labor Statistics last measured tenure in 2024. For workers aged 55 to 64, median tenure was 9.6 years. Those are not merely units of labor purchased on a market. They are portions of finite human lives. If investment creates a claim to governance, labor is also an investment. And labor invests something capital never can: a life.
From Stronger Unions to Workplace Democracy
None of this requires abolishing managers, entrepreneurs or markets. Nor does workplace democracy mean holding a companywide referendum every time someone orders office supplies. Political democracy does not mean citizens personally decide every administrative question either. Democracy means creating institutions through which those subject to power possess meaningful representation, enforceable rights and a voice in consequential decisions. There are already working models.
Germany and other European countries already give workers a formal voice in corporate governance through codetermination. The predicted economic disaster has not materialized. Research finds effects ranging from neutral to modestly positive, while a Finnish reform actually increased labor productivity. Workplace democracy, it turns out, is not the enemy of economic efficiency. These institutions are hardly revolutionary. Indeed, that is precisely their significance. They demonstrate that the choice is not between contemporary American capitalism and some imaginary economy in which every workplace becomes a commune.
There is a vast institutional terrain we have barely begun to explore. The possibilities are hardly mysterious: stronger unions, works councils, worker representation on corporate boards, cooperatives and codetermination. No single model will suit every enterprise. The principle matters more than the blueprint: economic power should be democratized. Economist Richard D. Wolff has made workplace democracy central to his critique of capitalism, arguing in Democracy at Work (2012) that political democracy remains radically incomplete when workers have little say over the enterprises in which they spend much of their lives.
Political democracy without economic democracy is democracy only in a severely diminished sense. When wealth is radically concentrated, economic power readily spills into political power: those who command vastly unequal resources possess vastly unequal capacities to shape the institutions supposedly governed by all. The ballot may proclaim one person, one vote, while the society surrounding the ballot ensures that some voices carry vastly farther than others.
This is the contradiction liberal democracy has never resolved. It democratized the state while leaving much of the economy under private government. It abolished property qualifications for political citizenship while allowing property to remain a qualification for exercising economic power. Democracy was extended to the citizen but withheld from the worker.
The labor movement understood something we are in danger of forgetting. The weekend was not a gift. Neither were the eight-hour day, workplace safety laws or collective bargaining. They were won because workers organized against concentrations of economic power and insisted that employers did not possess unlimited authority merely because they owned capital.
The history we commemorate on Labor Day is therefore not fundamentally a history of society learning to appreciate workers. It is a history of workers demanding power. That distinction matters. A society can praise workers endlessly while leaving untouched the institutions that subordinate them. Indeed, praise can become one means of preserving those institutions. We thank “essential workers.” We celebrate the dignity of labor. We call workers the backbone of the nation. Then we return them to workplaces in which they frequently possess less democratic authority than they exercise over the local school board.
Labor Day can therefore function ideologically—not because honoring labor is wrong, but because ceremonial recognition can substitute for structural transformation. The greatest tribute we could pay workers would be to take seriously the democratic principle we claim defines our political life. If those subject to political power deserve representation, why should those subject to economic power deserve less? If arbitrary authority is objectionable in government, why should it become acceptable in the corporation? If human beings are capable of participating in decisions about war, taxation, criminal justice and constitutional government, why should they be regarded as incapable of participating in decisions about the workplaces they understand better than almost anyone else?
The Next Great Democratic Project
These questions become more urgent as artificial intelligence and automation transform work. Decisions about whether technology eliminates jobs, intensifies surveillance, increases productivity, shortens the working week or simply transfers more income from labor to capital cannot be regarded as purely technical decisions belonging exclusively to owners and executives. They concern the shape of our common world. Workers should participate in making them.
Labor Day should therefore remind us that democracy remains unfinished. We have extended the democratic principle, however imperfectly, into political life. We insist that those subject to power should have some voice in its exercise. We regard government without representation as domination rather than freedom. Yet every morning millions of people cross an invisible boundary where this principle suddenly weakens. They enter workplaces in which decisions profoundly affecting their time, security, health, income and future are made with little or no participation from them.
We have learned to call this freedom because the employment contract was formally voluntary. But freedom worthy of the name must mean more than the freedom to choose who will exercise power over us. The next great democratic project may therefore be neither simply political nor simply economic. It is the extension of democracy into the sphere where most adults spend much of their waking lives.
Workers do not need another day on which society thanks them. They need power. Perhaps the most fitting way to honor labor, then, is finally to trust working people with what democracy has always promised them: a voice in governing the world they themselves help to create.
*Sam Ben-Meir teaches philosophy at the City University of New York, College of Technology. He is the author of Ethical Interanimality: Toward a Relational Philosophy of Nature (Westphalia Press, 2026). [IDN-InDepthNews]