The Cambridge Handbook of US Labor Law for the Twenty-First Century decries federal labor law for forsaking American workers and undermining American unions. Its contributors seek a reformed labor law for the current century. In this review essay, I examine the handbook’s contention that federal labor law has failed. To assess the merits of the claim, we must test the foundations of its contributors’ assumptions—about the labor movement, about the place of the labor movement in the political economy of American capitalism envisaged by labor law, and, indeed, about law itself. To do so, I turn to earlier, critical research on the character of American labor laws, notably Joel Rogers’s seminal 1990 essay “Divide and Conquer,” and also to work of my own. To put it crudely, I ask how much labor law reform actually matters.

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Seir 的呼唤：美国劳动法的意义和未来

二十一世纪美国劳动法剑桥手册谴责联邦劳动法抛弃美国工人并破坏美国工会。它的贡献者寻求本世纪的改革劳动法。在这篇评论文章中，我研究了手册中关于联邦劳动法失败的论点。为了评估该主张的价值，我们必须检验其贡献者假设的基础——关于劳工运动，关于劳工运动在劳工法所设想的美国资本主义政治经济学中的地位，实际上，关于法律本身. 为此，我转向早期对美国劳动法特征的批判性研究，尤其是乔尔·罗杰斯 1990 年的开创性文章“分而治之”，以及我自己的工作。粗略地说，我问劳动法改革到底有多重要.