Labor Unions

Labor Unions Hate Robots—and It's Stopping Democrats From Delivering on Affordability

Labor unions almost always value union jobs over technologies that save time, money, and lives.

Peter Suderman | From the August/September 2026 issue

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(Illustration: Midjourney)

Democrats have a union problem. They have tied their political fortunes to unions, public and private, in ways that exacerbate intraparty conflict while stymieing both progressive and moderate goals. That's not just a problem for the party. Democratic deference to unions creates economic hurdles for much of the country—almost everyone who isn't in a union, and even some people who are—because today's unions function as roadblocks to the future.

To understand the party's problem, consider that the two most powerful words in Democratic politics in 2026 are abundance and affordability. Both represent rival party factions.

The abundance faction is a predominantly young, educated, and urban cohort of policy wonks, journalists, and activists who generally believe that the Democratic Party has overemphasized identity politics while moving too far to the left on economics, particularly when it comes to urban governance and housing policy. They tend to favor technological progress and measurable gains in efficiency. One of the movement's core insights is that Democrats, who essentially have uniparty control of America's biggest, most important cities, need to deliver better governance and a better standard of living for their constituents—and that to do this they must embrace deregulation, private business, market mechanisms, and high-quality policy analysis.

That starts with housing, which has been overregulated to the point of strangulation, resulting in shortages that have dramatically increased home prices in and around the country's most desirable cities. The core issue is one of supply and demand, and Democratic politicians have often chosen to restrict supply and subsidize demand. In the abundance view, what those cities need (and what Democrats need to deliver) is more housing, primarily via market mechanisms that allow developers to build. More supply will ease demand and lower prices.

From this insight—that markets are an efficient and necessary way to deliver more goods at lower prices—an entire theory of policy flowered. What if market mechanisms are a good way to deliver all sorts of goods beyond housing? What if markets depend on developers, entrepreneurs, and businesspeople who are often quite wealthy? What if building new things, and even new labor-saving technologies, was the path to widely shared prosperity? What if there was an entire policy agenda devoted to delivering these goods via these processes? Perhaps you could call it an abundance agenda.

The abundance advocates are not libertarians. They tend to favor some form of social welfare spending. They sometimes say they want government to be good at doing and building things, like high-speed rail. But even this is a welcome acknowledgment that, in general, government is not great at doing things. Much of the movement amounts to the reinvention of Adam Smith from observational data, the primary observation being that Democratic Party governance has been a disaster. Better late than never.

On the opposite side of the party are the affordability mongers. Yes, abundance types will sometimes use the word too, but affordability has been more associated with politicians like Zohran Mamdani, the young member of the Democratic Socialists of America who is also now the mayor of New York City. Mamdani's social media–savvy mayoral campaign helped boost affordability into political buzzword status.

Affordability is partly a response by the party's left flank to the abundance movement's market-friendly critique, and sometimes it comes with a grudging acknowledgement that the construction of new homes might require actually letting developers build some homes. But mostly it's a rhetorical dodge, a marketing gimmick that allows the socialist-curious and their fellow travelers—the Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren axis—to disavow responsibility for the party's many policy mistakes while pushing further interventions into the economy.

Abundance is how you get a one-bedroom apartment that costs less than an aircraft carrier within walking distance of a cute matcha shop. Affordability is how you get subsidized daycare and city-run grocery stores.

While these two factions are at odds, they share a key premise, which is that modern life is too expensive for ordinary people, especially in American cities. One reason life is so expensive is an obstacle that neither side is well-equipped to deal with: labor unions. Democrats say they want abundance and affordability for America, but deferring to union demands will mean they can't deliver either.

Driverless Cars, Deadhead Ubers, and Expensive Groceries

Public sector labor unions are key drivers of bloated spending, low performance, and all-around inefficiency in state and local governments. Private sector labor unions have repeatedly attempted to block labor-saving technologies, create legal requirements that slow new construction, and push tax policies that would undermine innovation and entrepreneurship, specifically in the tech sector.

For the affordability faction, which favors big-government solutions and top-down control, unions are an affirmative good, a source of both high-paying working-class jobs and partisan political muscle. For the abundance faction, labor is a longstanding part of the Democratic coalition, an interest group........

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