The future of labor law is by no means assured. Due to recent Supreme Court decisions that do not favor workers’ right to organize, we are now facing “existential threats to our system,” according to Ben Sachs, Kestnbaum Professor of Labor and Industry at Harvard. Professor of Practice Sharon Block, a labor law expert who worked in both the Obama and Biden administrations, added: “There were always ways of interpreting the [National Labor Relations] Act for better or worse, but I’d never thought we’d be facing this kind of moment.”

Both professors spoke at “The Future of American Labor Law,” a panel cohosted by the American Constitution Society, the Women’s Law Association, the Labor and Employment Action Project, and the Center for Labor and a Just Economy, where Block is executive director and Sachs is faculty co-director.

Block began by underlining the importance of labor law. “If you take advantage of the rights that labor law provides, it’s an entree into having agency, a voice, a measure of control over everything that happens in your workplace. We should agree as a society that there is a floor that everyone is protected by, that we don’t want a society where people are making less than $7.25 an hour. But the law should protect more than a floor, and that’s what labor law is. It allows workers to exercise some standard of power and control that brings them up above this minimal standard of decency.”

One game-changing recent case, she said, was SEC v. Jaresky,...

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