In the wake of this month’s (at least provisional) defeat in Bessemer, America’s labor movement has a significant opportunity in the form of the PRO Act. Currently pending in the Senate after passage through the House, the Protecting the Right to Organize Act would constitute the most decisive and comprehensive reform of labor law in decades — in addition to making several of the tactics employed by Amazon during the recent union drive illegal. In essence, it would both make it easier to form unions and make them more durable over the long term — also including provisions that would penalize both companies and their executives for violating workers’ rights.

Though the bill’s chances in the Senate are slim in the short term, the broader moment is potentially a watershed for the labor movement, whose membership has dropped precipitously since the 1980s, when some 20 percent of Americans belonged to unions (today, the figure is less than 11 percent). And, as the findings of a recent survey by the Pew Research Center suggest, renewed efforts to strengthen and expand union membership have a majority of Americans on their side. General approval of organized labor has fluctuated in recent decades, though it declined noticeably during the first decade of the twenty-first century — Pew identifying a 12 percent drop in favorability toward unions between 2001 and 2013.

The center’s most recent survey, however, finds that a solid majority is today concerned about the long-term decline of America’s labor movement and its implications for working people. Pew’s analysis, conducted among over five thousand American adults between April 5 and 11, identified some 56 percent who agree that “the large reduction over the past several decades in the percentage of workers who are represented by unions” has been either “somewhat” or “very” bad for the country. Meanwhile, 60 percent said that the long-term reduction in union membership has been “bad for working people.”