On Labor Day, the “Clean Slate for Reform,” a labor law project based at the Harvard Law School, released a report on progress on its “tasks ahead.” The Clean Slate effort, led by two Harvard academics and including eighty participants, believes that Americans have a “shared national understanding” that economic and political power are out of whack in the country. Like the Labor Law Reform Act of 1977 and efforts before and after it, the idea is to combat inequality and arrest the decline in worker organization through a reasonable set of legal reforms that fit with modern times.

Previous efforts have failed, even during Democratic administrations, but the academics believe that this time it can be different. Of course, any brilliant legal theories which arise from the Clean Slate project will have to be accepted by a perennially anti-worker Congress or endorsed by federal courts packed with corporate judges, a tough sell to say the least.

Having represented every union active in the South during my legal career, which has coincided painfully with the long, slow decline of the union movement, I was saddened by the report on the initial tasks of the Clean Slate project. The authors, while well-intentioned, miss the main task in combatting inequality: respecting and building worker power and agency, to which militancy and democracy are central.