Democratic Abundance: An Abundance That Works for Workers

Key Takeaways

• The “abundance agenda” is incomplete without addressing power and distribution. The report argues that current abundance debates focus too narrowly on regulation and process, while overlooking how economic and political power shape what gets built—and who benefits.
• Rather than being a barrier, unions can help deliver infrastructure and housing at scale by supplying skilled labor (e.g., electricians for wind farms), supporting implementation, and improving outcomes.
• Unions play a critical role in building coalitions for public investment, helping secure support for policies that expand housing, clean energy, and infrastructure.
• Centering labor creates political durability for major infrastructure investments. For example, if the Inflation Reduction Act had been in place long enough to generate the union jobs it promoted, its provisions would be far more difficult for subsequent administrations to repeal.

Introduction

The “abundance agenda” identifies a worthy goal: to ask what people really need and to organize government to make sure there is enough of it, including by eliminating unnecessary delays and veto points. However, abundance’s theory of why government fails to provide the goods people need and how to change that reality falls short. As critics have argued, abundance is insufficiently attentive to questions of political power and distribution, undervalues democratic participation, and sidelines discussions about trade-offs, including around the importance of protecting labor standards and the environment. Centering the role of workers and organized labor helps respond to all three of these flaws, ensuring that abundance is truly democratic, rather than exacerbating inequality or democratic erosion at a time of authoritarian backsliding. Organized labor—in its existing form and even more so with key reforms—can play an essential role in delivering a democratic version of abundance. Unions can provide a steady stream of labor for new infrastructure projects, help abundance programs overcome political obstacles, and increase the legitimacy and efficacy of abundance programs—though success will ultimately require changes to some unions’ practices and to public policies. In turn, the abundance agenda, properly designed, can help labor—indeed, all working people—by increasing the supply of good jobs, providing desperately needed infrastructure for workers, and facilitating labor organizing.

Organized labor—in its existing form and even more so with key reforms—can play an essential role in delivering a democratic version of abundance.

I. The Abundance Debate and the Need for Democratic Abundance

In recent months, the abundance agenda has captured a great deal of attention, gaining momentum across the political landscape. It has also prompted sharp criticism, chiefly from commentators on the Left, including those within the labor movement.¹ “Abundance” is now a broad banner claimed by many different factions with different objectives, but, at its core, it means massive increases in the supply of essential goods such as housing, transportation, and clean energy infrastructure, in order to make them more affordable and accessible. Advanced most prominently by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, the abundance agenda “asks what it is that people really need and then organizes government to make sure there is enough of it.”²

What’s not to like about that? No one objects to the government achieving the things people really need. Rather, the controversy lies in the abundance movement’s diagnosis of why we lack such investment now, and how we should provide for it in the future. Klein and Thompson focus on innovation as well as infrastructure. This report focuses only on infrastructure, but scientific and technological innovation also raises a host of important questions regarding the role of labor and merits separate exploration.

Klein and Thompson argue that the core obstacle to the supply of goods like housing, transportation, and public works is excessive administrative burden—including restrictive zoning rules, burdensome regulations and preferences, and the availability of legal challenge—which allows well-organized communities to block change or hold up development projects as leverage for additional concessions. In Klein and Thompson’s view, these veto points stop projects from being built, to the detriment of the broader public interest. They argue that Democrats in particular across the country have allowed process and regulation to squelch production, resulting in “blue” cities having some of the most expensive and scarcest housing markets and the worst track records on infrastructure. In their view, “liberalism has become obsessed with procedure rather than with outcomes.” Klein and Thompson’s work builds on earlier scholarship and commentary such as Nicholas Bagley’s The Procedure Fetish, which argues that administrative procedures result in a government that has difficulty accomplishing important tasks,³ and Marc Dunkelman’s Why Nothing Works, which argues that progressives’ resistance to centralized power helped proliferate excessive checks on government action.⁴ The abundance movement also builds on a related movement by academics and practitioners including Steve Teles and civic tech reformer Jennifer Pahlka, who are focused on state capacity and the need for reform of internal government processes and structures to unlock more innovation and more efficient service delivery.⁵

Above all, ignoring the constructive economic and political role that organized labor can play weakens the ability of abundance to deliver supply on its own terms—and threatens the broader health of our democracy.

Though Klein and Thompson don’t themselves urge wholesale deregulation, their argument has significant deregulatory implications.⁶ After all, if the problem preventing developers from building the housing that society needs is excess regulation, the answer is to deregulate—to eliminate not only restrictive zoning rules but all regulation that slows down building, from labor standards to environmental rules. And if the problem is that certain organized constituencies, including unions, exploit veto points to slow down decision-making or extract “rents” that raise the costs of building, including through labor standards, then the obvious solution is to eliminate community input mechanisms.⁷ Likewise, if the public sector is slow and inefficient, privatization would be the best route to expanding housing. One camp of abundance supporters embraces and runs with these arguments.

We, along with other critics of abundance, argue that, while the abundance goal should be embraced, its analysis of what causes the scarcity crisis is partial at best and therefore lends itself to overly generalized interpretations and wrongheaded prescriptions.⁸ To be sure, excessive process and regulation can indeed be obstacles to action. As two scholars who have spent time in government, we can attest to how the accretion of procedure can delay or even kill important policies—from infrastructure investments to new social programs.

Yet just as significant, if not more so, are the ways that concentrated economic and political power shapes public- and private-sector decisions, including what gets built and what doesn’t.⁹ As numerous critics have argued, the abundance analysis fails to center these questions of power and distribution, declining to grapple with the outsized role that concentrated wealth and organized business interests play in the governing process.¹⁰

Moreover, while abundance proponents are right that labor unions have sometimes blocked or slowed down development efforts, they generally do so with laudable aims: to ensure higher-wage work or guarantees of labor standards. Abundance proponents largely fail to consider how the aim of good jobs could be integrated into abundance proposals without causing delays; they also neglect labor’s potential to serve as a countervailing force to organized business, as well as its ability to make abundance projects more effective and more responsive to communities’ needs. Above all, ignoring the constructive economic and political role that organized labor can play weakens the ability of abundance to deliver supply on its own terms—and threatens the broader health of our democracy.

If designed with redistribution in mind, abundance policies can help build countervailing power among workers and other historically marginalized groups and can check the risks of crony capitalism and corruption too prevalent in our economy.

The distribution of economic and political power matters for determining what policies are feasible to pursue in the first place and for deciding which projects should be prioritized. For example, we can’t make meaningful investments in a clean energy transition if concentrated fossil fuel interests retain outsized political clout. Unions play an important role in building political coalitions supportive of investments in clean energy—as they did for the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) under the Biden administration.¹¹ The strength of union coalitions can, in turn, determine the long-run durability of public investments; had the IRA been in place long enough to generate the union jobs it promoted, it would likely have been more challenging for the Trump administration to repeal so many of its provisions. Similarly, meaningful investment in public goods is difficult to achieve if wealthy interests block efforts to increase their tax burden and promote privatization from which they stand to gain. Unions can and have supported coalitions to raise more tax revenue for public projects, in the face of opposition from wealthy individuals and businesses.¹² Power also matters on the back end: Without attention to problems of political power, abundance policies and investments risk reinforcing existing asymmetries of economic and political power. However, if designed with redistribution in mind, abundance policies can help build countervailing power among workers and other historically marginalized groups and can check the risks of crony capitalism and corruption too prevalent in our economy.

In short, some of the deregulation envisioned by abundance proponents—including reforms to reduce the power of Not-in-My-Backyard (NIMBY) objectors—might be a positive development. But deregulation alone will not address the most significant obstacles to providing abundant goods. Nor will it ensure that abundance-oriented projects serve the public interest rather than private gain. Indeed, in many cases, wholesale deregulation would be counterproductive, further empowering concentrated economic interests.

Another problem is that the standard abundance account tends to understate the value of democratic participation in governmental decisions. Abundance advocates frequently treat citizen participation with government as a chokepoint and seek to minimize it rather than rethink or attempt to improve mechanisms of democratic engagement. This is counterproductive on several levels. In many cases, the pathologies of participation that abundance points to are the product of insufficient and unrepresentative participation. In one of the most common examples abundance proponents cite—local zoning meetings that permit NIMBY interests to hold up development—the issue is that the individuals with time and motivation to attend local zoning meetings are unrepresentative of the broader set of potential constituents, and zoning boards fail to hear from proponents of new housing. Finding streamlined and timely ways to bring in those currently excluded from participating may be more productive than simply eliminating participation altogether. Public participation can surface important information that improves timely implementation of new programs and projects. And most importantly, participation can build legitimacy for the decisions that are ultimately made by elected officials and government administrators, preventing or minimizing backlash that restricts the ability to make further investments.

Unions are particularly promising vehicles for realizing the potential of citizen engagement, given their role as internally democratic organizations that can aggregate the preferences of their members and engage with private-sector developers as well as government. As we discuss below, unions could be especially promising vehicles for “thick” representation if they broadened their representation of workers from individual occupations to sectors or regions, focused more on organizing new workers, and represented their members’ interests both as producers and as consumers—for instance, by considering their members’ interests as renters, energy consumers, parents, and caregivers. Given that union membership rates are far lower than what workers would prefer, policy reforms need to both increase union density and encourage the kind of unions structured along the lines we describe.

Finally, some abundance advocates seem willing to sacrifice such values as environmental protection and fair labor standards in the pursuit of rapid growth and production. Ultimately, the worry is that the abundance movement will produce more supply, but in a way that benefits wealthy consumers and powerful producers, not the public good—which could, in turn, generate backlash against further efforts to expand supply. For example, consider the possibility of an unchecked proliferation of data centers that do not supply good jobs and are extractive on the communities in which they are sited, consuming vast amounts of local natural resources and thereby fueling backlash. Ensuring that new infrastructure construction supports worker power and organizing not only benefits abundance itself but can also rebalance economic and political power in favor of a more responsive democracy, especially at a moment of authoritarian threat in the United States.

Considered together, these flaws in the dominant abundance analysis are significant. In particular, the version of abundance that embraces blanket deregulation, unrestricted growth, and the exclusion of affected communities from the processes of government is deeply troubling.

Ensuring that new infrastructure construction supports worker power and organizing not only benefits abundance itself but can also rebalance economic and political power in favor of a more responsive democracy, especially at a moment of authoritarian threat in the United States.

But the response need not be a rejection of the aim of abundance: providing the goods that society requires in abundant quantities and on a quick timeline. Rather, the goal should be an abundance policy that is mindful of power, democracy, distribution, and environmental salvation—a policy that promotes an effective and informed government reflecting critical public values.¹³ In a recent taxonomy of abundance, Steve Teles describes such an approach as “red plenty abundance” (labor) or “cascadian abundance” (environmental), and, to some extent, “liberal abundance.”¹⁴ A more apt term that captures the commonalities among these approaches might be “democratic abundance.”¹⁵

Democratic abundance shares with other variations of abundance a commitment to providing what people really need and then organizing government to make sure there is enough of it. But it recognizes that, while procedure can be an impediment, an equal or greater obstacle to providing critical social goods is concentrated economic and political power. As such, the abundance agenda must be designed in ways that are both redistributive and democratic. Inevitably, there are trade-offs to be made, but those trade-offs should be made in the public interest and not dominated by concentrated economic interests. As we describe at length below, labor has a central role to play in democratic abundance: It can both facilitate abundance’s success and benefit from its achievements.

Democratic abundance has prevailed at earlier periods in history, with the government investing heavily in infrastructure to achieve broad-based prosperity, with significant input from democratic organizations, including unions.¹⁶ Although some unions have tended to focus primarily on their existing members’ interests, other unions—often the more industrially organized ones—have taken a broader perspective. Such unions played an important role in pushing for greater supply of infrastructure, recognizing that workers are consumers of such infrastructure as well as producers of it and that unions’ role should be to advance the needs of working people broadly.

Consider the example of housing, one of the foremost issues for abundance proponents. During the mid-20th century, labor was instrumental in increasing housing production through private cooperative methods and through lobbying for more state investment.¹⁷ In the 1920s, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America helped create the first housing cooperative in New York City, a cooperative that still stands today.¹⁸ In the 1940s, labor unions brought their focus on the supply of housing to the federal government, playing a central role in the passing of the federal Housing Act of 1949, which channeled substantial federal investment into new housing.¹⁹ Unions then took advantage of this program, with, for example, the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) building housing for its members using federal subsidies. The Amalgamated also became a model for the much larger, state-sponsored housing co-ops built in New York City during the post–World War II period through the 1970s.

At the local level, there are many more recent examples of unions helping increase the supply of housing, including unions representing both the building trades who benefit from new construction work and other workers who benefit as prospective renters and purchasers of more affordable housing. In the 1990s, a coalition of unions led a fight for new affordable housing and the preservation of existing public housing in Fairfield County, Connecticut, one of the wealthiest counties in the country with one of the scarcest housing markets.²⁰ And as we discuss below, unions have facilitated construction of new housing in several jurisdictions in the past few years. But at the federal level, unions, with the exception of the Building Trades, have played only a limited role in housing policy and advocating for greater production since the 1970s.²¹

With abundance gaining support across the political spectrum, labor now has the opportunity to engage again. As in earlier historical periods, the focus should be not only on protecting existing members but also on organizing new workers, raising standards in low-wage industries, and increasing the supply of housing and other infrastructure that working people need. In short, labor can help ensure that democratic abundance prevails. And the arguments against involving labor in abundance simply do not hold up.

Our argument unfurls as follows: First, we identify the central arguments made by abundance proponents against organized labor and explain why these critiques are misguided. We also highlight the failures of abundance efforts to date that have occurred without labor. Second, we describe how labor is central to a vision of democratic abundance, laying out the evidence for (a) how labor can provide skilled labor necessary for many of the infrastructure investments envisioned by abundance proponents, (b) how engagement with labor can build political support for the investments and reforms necessary for achieving abundance’s goals, and (c) how labor’s involvement can build greater political and democratic legitimacy for infrastructure investments and improve the efficacy of government decision-making. Third, we argue that labor should not give up on abundance. To the contrary, labor would benefit from a more fulsome engagement with abundance, and abundance can be designed to create not only an abundant supply of goods but also an abundant supply of good jobs. Finally, we explain why democratic abundance is so important in this particular moment of rising authoritarianism. As noted above, we focus on infrastructure, including housing, but similar arguments apply to other important services like the care economy, as well as to technological innovation—labor is no less important to these areas.

II. Responding to Labor’s Critics

Abundance proponents who critique labor’s role in the policy process make two key arguments. First, they contend that unions undermine abundance goals by increasing the cost of projects and slowing down production. Second, they argue that unions function as a special interest that distorts policy outcomes rather than represents broader public interests. We argue that both of these critiques are overstated, but, to the extent that they do have merit, they can be addressed through reforms that enhance both pro-labor and pro-abundance goals. The alternative—sacrificing labor and worker interests altogether—has deleterious effects on communities overall.

Critique 1: Unions, Costs, and Rent-Seeking: Abundance proponents who are critics of unions often point to unions driving up the cost of new construction—especially housing and infrastructure—by using their bargaining power to rent-seek, or extract extra costs without contributing anything of value in return, in negotiations with construction firms and government.²² Yet the actual record of unions and the evidence on construction costs refutes this simplistic narrative. Research suggests that, despite the fact that construction costs—especially labor costs—represent a large proportion of the expense of new building, construction costs do not strongly predict housing prices, particularly in recent years and for the most expensive cities.²³ Accordingly, labor costs cannot explain the rising costs of residential construction, particularly in the cities with the highest costs. Turning to major public infrastructure projects, a careful analysis of the cost of constructing interstate highways found that construction labor costs have generally remained steady since the 1970s, while interstate spending costs have ballooned. This suggests, as the study’s authors put it, that “increasing labor . . . prices are likely insufficient to explain much of the observed increase in spending per mile.”²⁴ Just as importantly, the authors find that the strength of labor across states—as measured by the presence of state right-to-work and prevailing wage laws—does not explain much variation in interstate construction spending across states. And recent research suggests that high costs in the construction industry may be attributable in part to outsized employer power, not labor power.²⁵ Construction businesses can raise prices and lower wages relative to a more competitive industry.

These findings are consistent with the broader research on union labor and public infrastructure construction, which finds that policies that encourage collective bargaining on construction projects lead to faster completion of quality projects by ensuring a steady labor supply of skilled workers without necessarily increasing costs. One example comes from Project Labor Agreements (PLAs), which are collective bargaining agreements that apply to a specific construction project and are negotiated before workers are hired onto the project. (As we discuss in Part III, the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) explicitly permits pre-hire collective bargaining agreements for the construction industry.) The Obama and Biden administrations encouraged federal agencies to use PLAs when funding new construction projects, with moves that the second Trump administration has continued.²⁶ As the Biden administration explained in its rulemaking requiring PLAs on large projects, “there is no definitive and compelling evidence to support the assertion that PLAs increase costs on Federal construction projects.”²⁷ On the contrary, PLAs often bring benefits in the form of a steady supply of workers—a key issue given long-standing shortages in skilled construction labor that are often a major source of delay in completing projects on time.²⁸ PLAs attract higher-skilled workers and ensure a steady worker supply by providing higher pay for more skilled openings, using union-run hiring halls to maintain a large network of skilled labor available for a project, reducing turnover and absenteeism through better working conditions and worker voice through unions, and encouraging safer workplaces through union monitoring of safety standards.

These findings are consistent with the broader research on union labor and public infrastructure construction, which finds that policies that encourage collective bargaining on construction projects lead to faster completion of quality projects by ensuring a steady labor supply of skilled workers without necessarily increasing costs.

In short, the evidence refutes the claim that the aggregate presence or strength of labor unions explains high housing and infrastructure costs. Nevertheless, it may still be the case that unions impose outsized costs on specific projects. In particular, critics frequently point to the high labor costs associated with transit projects in the United States; indeed, transit scholars have found that the cost of building new public transit in the United States exceeds other peer rich economies. In a striking example, the costs of the new Second Avenue Subway in New York City were 8–12 times higher than a baseline case informed by the experiences of other European countries.²⁹ In New York, as in other American cities, labor costs account for a substantially larger share of project costs than in other countries (40–60 percent of public transit costs, compared to 9–30 percent in peer countries).³⁰ Yet many of these other countries have much stronger labor movements than the United States, including in construction. Given the weakness of the American labor movement, it cannot be the case that labor’s strength alone directly determines the costs of public transit. Accordingly, it is instructive to consider more specifically why unions may have contributed to higher construction costs, and how changes to labor law could encourage more productive, efficient construction without undermining labor.

A closer look at the oft-cited transit example reveals that, in part, the higher labor costs in the United States reflect the costly procurement processes in the United States—processes that involve substantial interagency regulatory review, including consultants and lawyers, as well as overstaffing of white-collar labor supervising construction work.³¹ That said, some of the high costs in the United States (especially in the Northeast) do appear to be driven by a pernicious high-pay, low-productivity equilibrium among unionized, blue-collar construction workers.³² While unionized construction workers in other countries such as Sweden receive relatively high pay, that high pay is offset by high worker productivity and more flexible union work rules.³³ By comparison, critics emphasize that US transit union–bargained staffing and work rules often drive down productivity. As the New York Times reported in 2017, “trade unions . . . have secured deals requiring underground construction work to be staffed by as many as four times more laborers than elsewhere in the world.”³⁴ Facing the prospect of little future infrastructure construction, US construction unions rationally bargain for the most favorable terms for their existing members on the projects that are underway—even as those terms have negative externalities for the public as a whole in terms of less transit investment. One could imagine an alternative equilibrium in which a stronger guarantee of future infrastructure construction projects with good jobs—negotiated by unions, governments, and construction firms—could make it easier for unions to agree to more productive arrangements (such as lower staffing requirements) in exchange.

The comparison between Sweden and the United States and the counterfactual we present thus suggests that unions should not be eliminated from abundance projects; rather, governments should insist on collective bargaining agreements that allow for more investment, high productivity standards, and high pay for workers. This can be achieved through smart bargaining by transit authorities and other governmental entities. More fundamentally, however, labor law reforms should encourage this approach to bargaining by creating the right incentives for both unions and employers.

Union membership has been declining for decades in the United States, not because workers don’t want unions—a strong majority does—but because of aggressive corporate resistance enabled by pervasive problems with labor law, including weak penalties on corporate violators and underenforcement.³⁵ In addition, because of the structure of labor law in the United States, unions typically organize and bargain on a highly local basis—with individual projects or employers. As a result of both of these dynamics, unions have strong incentives to maximize the gains they can obtain for any one project and to focus on retaining particular jobs, even if those settlements have negative externalities for a sector or region as a whole, as with the example of the Second Avenue Subway project in New York City. As labor scholars (including one of us) have long argued, when unions represent a greater share of the economy and bargain across regions and sectors, not only do they do a better job at reducing economic inequality and ensuring labor rights for all workers,³⁶ but they also have a stronger incentive to consider the broader costs (and benefits) they may be creating for the economy as a whole.³⁷ As political economist Mancur Olson recognized decades ago, such encompassing unions internalize more of the effects their bargains have on the public.³⁸ More encompassing and centralized organizing and bargaining structures could also help unions better represent their members not just as producers but also as consumers—shifting away from narrower local and occupational representation. For this reason, proposals to enable sector-wide, regional, or even national organizing and bargaining are not just good for workers but could also align unions’ incentives with those of abundance advocates.

The comparison between Sweden and the United States and the counterfactual we present thus suggests that unions should not be eliminated from abundance projects; rather, governments should insist on collective bargaining agreements that allow for more investment, high productivity standards, and high pay for workers.

Critique 2: Unions, Democratic Representation, and a Perceived Failure to Represent the Public Interest: A second critique advanced by abundance proponents is that union leaders represent only their own interests—or that of privileged workers—in ways that undermine the public interest.³⁹ According to this account, union leaders may not sufficiently represent their members’ interests given a lack of internal union member participation, or labor unions may not represent the interests of broader communities given a low overall unionization rate. Yet labor unions, more often than not, do the opposite of what abundance critics allege: Unions increase the representativeness and democratic legitimacy of the policy process, as we argue in more detail in Part III. Moreover, to the extent that either of the representativeness critiques levied against unions have merit, the answer should be more democracy and representation, not less.

Those who critique union leadership for failing to represent the interests of union members often ignore the extent to which unions are necessarily structured as democratic organizations—more so than most other civil society organizations. Under both the NLRA and public-sector labor laws, unions are established when a majority of workers at a given workplace decide to form a union.⁴⁰ Once formed, the union is mandated to follow democratic procedures, as specified by the Labor–Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959.⁴¹ Among other requirements, union representatives owe a duty of fair representation to all employees covered by a collective bargaining agreement.⁴² The law also gives union members the rights to nominate candidates for union office, vote in union elections, ratify contracts, and participate in union meetings, and it imposes a host of transparency and financial disclosure requirements on unions so that members can hold their organizations accountable.⁴³ Few other organizations, including publicly held companies, are required by law to be as internally democratic as unions. On a broader level, unions can also serve as “schools of democracy”; at their best, they give members opportunities to develop civic skills relevant for participation in society.⁴⁴

That is not to say that all unions are perfectly democratic. Many unions have uncontested elections for their local leadership, and many international and national union associations do not have direct elections of their top leaders. Yet the appropriate response is not to jettison the democratic potential of unions. Instead, the answer is to work toward greater participation of members in their unions. Some unions, for example, hold mass membership meetings to discuss policy issues; others hold direct elections for national leadership. Many unions regularly survey and engage their members to understand their needs and priorities, including around workplace and community issues, and set their bargaining and political agendas based on deep listening and consultation with members. These kinds of internal union practices tend to produce more energetic and effective organizations.⁴⁵ But the bottom line is that unions are far more representative than nearly all organizations that participate in policymaking, most of which represent elite and corporate interests.⁴⁶

Few other organizations, including publicly held companies, are required by law to be as internally democratic as unions.

Efforts to dismiss unions as oppositional to the broader public interest are similarly misplaced. It is true that many workers are not members of unions and therefore are not directly represented when unions are brought into the governing process. But here, too, the answer is not to jettison unions’ representative function. Rather, the solution is to expand unionization’s reach. We have both argued elsewhere that it is essential to pursue the kind of labor reforms that can expand union membership, thereby broadening the constituencies to which unions are accountable.⁴⁷ In particular, we support reforms that would make it easier for all workers, including those currently excluded from labor law, to organize democratic, worksite-based organizations, while also extending the benefits of union representation on a sectoral basis. To truly achieve such change, federal labor law reform is needed. But even without federal statutory change, much can be achieved through tripartite approaches to governance at the local, state, and/or federal level, as we describe below. That is, by engaging unions, business, and the public in decision-making about abundance projects through tripartite administrative structures, abundance projects can achieve greater representation of workers and other affected constituencies, while also benefiting from greater on-the-ground expertise in decision-making.

The “Red” State Mirage—When Abundance Lacks Labor: In addition to offering the above critiques of labor, abundance proponents often tout the success of “red” states and cities with minimal regulation and weak labor unions—such as Arizona, Texas, or Wyoming—at building large volumes of new housing. (Though when incomes are considered, many of these Southwestern red states also see very high levels of housing unaffordability.⁴⁸) Abundance proponents argue that the success of these states in building large supplies of new housing suggests that housing abundance need not require strong unions or labor standards. But these red state housing “miracles” are often built on a shaky, unsustainable foundation that threatens vulnerable workers.

In the most prominent example, the Texas residential construction boom has been built on poor wages and working conditions, as well as outright violations of labor, health, and safety standards. Without unions or labor standards, many of the construction workers employed on new residential housing projects face significant financial hardships, wage theft, illegal misclassification and evasion of labor protections and standards, and outsized rates of injuries and fatalities.⁴⁹ This is not a sustainable approach for the rest of the country to follow. Poor working conditions represent a policy failure for affected workers and a failure for abundance on its own terms—that is, this approach fails to consider the ways that citizens are both consumers and workers. Over the longer run, abundance approaches that ignore the quality of the jobs being created also run the risk of political backlash, which we discuss in more detail below. Additionally, new research suggests that the red states and cities that once excelled at building residential construction are now also struggling to build more stock even as these cities and states continue to lack strong labor unions, casting further doubt on the role of labor costs and unions as drivers of the slowdown in construction (as opposed to other barriers to construction).⁵⁰