"Good Jobs" Are No Longer Enough

From Detroit to NYC to Chicago: Why Labor Must Bargain for the Information Economy On June 3, 2015, I stood before Local 2499 of the National Border Patrol Council in Detroit. I had been invited there not as a labor economist, but as a civil rights leader. As the founding CEO of the Detroit LGBT Chamber of Commerce, I was being recognized for my 2014 commitment to diversity and inclusion and for helping build bridges between communities that, historically, had not always found themselves in the same room. It was a meaningful moment. An LGBTQ human rights advocate receiving recognition from a Border Patrol union would have seemed unlikely only a few months earlier. Having been detailed and threatened with arrest by that same patrol, I was proud of what that event represented.

Then I changed the subject.

At least, that’s what many people in the audience thought.

During my remarks, I began talking about the changing economics of the American middle class. I argued that what we traditionally understood as a middle-class standard of living increasingly required household incomes approaching $200,000 a year. Before I could explain why, someone shouted from the audience, “What does that make us?” Others joined in. The room became animated, not because people disagreed with mathematics, but because they believed I had questioned the dignity of their work.

Afterward, my mother, an SEIU steward who had accompanied me on the trip while visiting the city where she lives, offered me advice that has stayed with me ever since.

“Maybe don’t begin your next speech by telling people who work every day that they’re poor.”

She was right.

Those Border Patrol agents were not looking for an economics lecture. They were doing exactly what America had promised would lead to stability. They had chosen public service. They belonged to a union. They worked difficult jobs under demanding conditions. They believed that honest work, fairly compensated, would provide security for their families.

The problem was never their work.

The problem was that I had started with the conclusion before explaining the transformation that had produced it.

Looking back, I realize I was trying to describe a problem before I fully understood its cause. More importantly, I was trying to introduce an idea before the economic language existed to explain it. Many people believed I had wandered off topic. In hindsight, I think I had simply arrived early.

Over the next decade, that moment in Detroit became one of the experiences that shaped my research. I wanted to answer a question that I could not answer satisfactorily that afternoon: if workers continued becoming more productive, why did so many feel that economic security was slipping further away? Why did the promise that “a good-paying job” would build a middle-class life seem increasingly out of reach, even for union workers and public servants?

Today, the numbers tell part of the story. A salary of $100,000 in 2026 has roughly the same purchasing power as approximately $51,500 had in the year 2000. In one generation, the purchasing power of wages has effectively been cut in half. Even that comparison understates reality because it relies on average inflation. Housing, healthcare, childcare, insurance, and higher education have risen faster than overall consumer prices, meaning that many working families experience an even greater decline in their effective standard of living.

It is therefore understandable that so many Americans say, “A hundred thousand dollars isn’t what it used to be.” They are not imagining the problem.

But inflation alone cannot explain what has happened.

If rising prices were the entire story, then productivity and wages should still be moving together over the long run. Instead, we have watched organizations become extraordinarily more productive while many workers—whether they wear uniforms, steel-toed boots, scrubs, business suits, or name badges—find themselves negotiating over a shrinking share of the value they help create.

The explanation, I believe, is that the economy has quietly changed the nature of production itself.

For more than a century, labor negotiations focused on wages because labor was understood to be the principal human contribution to production. That framework made sense in an industrial economy. A worker exchanged time and skill for compensation, and collective bargaining sought to ensure that workers received a fair share of the wealth their labor produced.

The twenty-first-century economy operates differently.

Today, organizations learn.

Every interaction makes them smarter.

Every customer teaches them.

Every employee teaches them.

Every citizen teaches them.