The recent wave of union organizing in the service sector has raised hopes that a fundamental transformation is occurring in the United States that will revitalize collective bargaining and bring millions of young workers into the labor movement. At the epicenter of this movement is a mass campaign to organize Starbucks employees. As of this week, more than two hundred Starbucks stores across thirty-two states have unionized, and workers at dozens more stores have filed petitions to unionize. In terms of organizing success, this is a significant accomplishment worthy of the media attention it is receiving.

However, organizing is only the first stage in an extended and perilous journey toward sustainable collective bargaining. Harvard’s Paul Weiler described the reward for successful organizing as a “license to bargain.” Whether that license results in a sustainable collective agreement depends upon a range of factors that influence the parties’ relative bargaining power. One important factor in this regard is how the law structures negotiations. Who bargains with whom?

This is an important point that goes to the fundamental challenge of retrofitting a collective bargaining model designed for the mass-production economy of the 1930s to the twenty-first-century service economy. When the United Auto Workers sat across the table from executives at General Motors and threated to strike if their proposals were not met, GM had good reason to listen. A strike by thousands of workers at once would effectively halt production, costing GM millions of dollars in lost revenues and profits.