David's answer to my question made a lot of sense. I want to pick up on one part of it: expanding the labor movement, and to put in a plug for a law that could make an important difference in realizing the goal.

David stresses the critical role labor has played in progressive politics. There are good local examples with pretty high visibility, like living wage laws, that typically have labor activists somewhere in the mix. Wal-Mart Watch, a project started by the Service Employees International Union, has had great success in forcing better compensation and labor practices at that retail behemoth. And on the economic front, the union advantage in terms of wages, benefits, vacations, etc., are well known and thoroughly documented (though what with globalization and the long-term slide in union membership, even unions' bargaining power ain't what it used to be).

No less than Paul Krugman devotes considerable space in his recent book to the role that labor movement has played in building a strong middle class, and conversely, how a diminished labor movement has been unable to stave off the current onslaught of conservative economic and social policies that are straining the middle class to the breaking point.

I suspect all of this is fairly well known to the readers of these pages. But here's something you might not know. According to the pre-eminent labor economist Richard Freeman, about half of the non-unionized workforce would vote to form a union. And Freeman, a Harvard professor with stellar credentials (i.e., not some wild-eyed radical), writes:

"Although the proportion of the US workforce covered by unions has been falling for years, unions are still the single largest group of Americans concerned with, and committed to fighting, the new inequality. Indeed, without an enhanced union movement I cannot imagine how the United States can ever get itself organized to reduce the new inequality."

(BTW, Freeman's recent book, America Works, got too little attention. It's a great, punchy, and super-informative read.)

So, why am I raising all this in the context of David's book club? Because while I get the essence of his bottom-up activism, my focus is on what can activists do to move the agenda from the top-down. And one answer is to agitate for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, or EFCA.

I won't go into any depth as to what it is (see here). It's also called the "card-check" bill because it would force employers to certify a union if a majority of eligible workers signed cards saying they want to form a union. Under current law, employers can call for an election months after the cards are signed, and in the interim, they have tremendous leeway to influence the election, while the potential union holds almost no playing cards.

So EFCA levels the organizing playing field. I don't know how much difference it will make, but every union organizer I've ever spoken to about it--and I mean all of them--consider it the Holy Grail, so there's probably something real there. After all, if millions of workers consistently tell pollsters that they'd like to bargain collectively--and why wouldn't they, given how even the bargaining power of white collar workers has tanked--yet membership continues to slide, the upper hand of anti-union employers is probably queering the deal.

BTW, he hasn't said much about it, but one of the candidates running for president supports EFCA. You'll have to figure out which one for yourselves.