Roads Not Taken

For American workers, the social contract is broken. This book gives a firsthand view of where the breaks occurred, and a prescription for rebuilding it to give workers their due.

With AI making the decisions and CEOs and moguls making the money, sometimes it seems that most workers today might as well be drones. If not for a long string of missed opportunities over the last 50 years, it might have been different. In Roads Not Taken, Thomas Kochan reviews the turning points where the social contract fractured and broke, reducing workers’ voices as well as their compensation, benefits, and status. And in the lessons learned from these historical examples, he identifies the foundation for building a new labor relations system that ensures workers will share in the benefits from AI and puts America on course for an innovative and durable social contract at work.

As a longtime advisor to government, labor, and management leaders, Kochan offers an eyewitness perspective on the mounting mistakes made in America’s labor relations system beginning, roughly, with Ronald Reagan’s firing of striking air traffic controllers in 1981. His book makes a strong case for new strategies on the part of labor unions and other worker advocacy groups, business, and government—strategies not wedded to the legacy labor law and practice that have failed American workers for so long. Recasting the social contract on this basis, Kochan insists, is key to rebuilding our democracy and its institutions after the damage wrought in recent years.