The Anti-Labor Undercurrent of 'Abundance'

The post-Reconstruction United States has never seen durable progressive change without the labor movement’s involvement. The postwar economy’s rapid, widely distributed gains in material conditions for everyday Americans may be the banner accomplishment, but the movement’s contributions to progress go far further. Working women organized through the labor movement became significant drivers of the suffrage movement. Unions played an essential role in the Civil Rights movement, including the steelworkers and UAW providing crucial support for the March on Washington. Some of the earliest workplace discrimination protections for same-sex couples were won by the United Mine Workers of America.

Since industrialization, the labor movement has been the greatest engine not just of advancing worker interests, but of achieving social progress more generally.

This is not to say that the labor movement is the perfect embodiment of hippie harmony. It has and continues to struggle with issues of sexism, racism, nativism, and other sundry prejudices. But what sets the labor movement apart is the principle of solidarity that has enabled it to build broad-based coalitions in the face of those disagreements.

As Richard Trumka, the late president of the AFL-CIO, wrote, “Progress, steadily gained, is fueled by the power of a mobilized community. Every victory in the fight against oppression has ultimately been achieved by that spirit of solidarity.”

It’s the principle of leaving no one behind that unites the labor movement, both internally and with other causes. Union organizers, members, and leadership are consistently on the front lines of fighting for broadly shared prosperity.

All of this is why the scorn shown by elements of the “abundance” movement—the latest neoliberal rebrand—ought to be deeply concerning for those of us in the labor movement as well as for everyone who believes in building an economy that delivers for working Americans and their families.

The abundance movement is a cross-partisan initiative bankrolled by money from the crypto, oil, and tech industries. What do these well-monied interests want? They seek to create newly ascendant factions within both major parties that focus on “government efficiency,” streamlining building, and eliminating chokepoints where policy implementation gets stuck. As outlined in the book Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, an abundance approach invites its adherents to become “bottleneck detectives” in order to identify where governance gets stuck and who is blocking its way.

As with any broad coalition, there is not uniformity on what exactly this sort of paradigm looks like in practice. But a significant portion of the abundance movement views labor as a barrier that needs to be overcome in the name of efficiency.

There certainly are elements of the abundance movement that are not anti-union. Klein and Thompson, for their part, are at least nominally pro-labor. The opening pages of their book, which sketches out the type of utopia they want to achieve, makes mention of greater worker rights. In a recent column for The New York Times, Klein endorsed making it easier to unionize.

The Breakthrough Institute, a vocal and early proponent of the abundance approach, has explored how industrial unions could help achieve their ‘ecomodernist’ vision.

Others, though, insist that unions stand in the way of achieving abundance, and view Klein and Thompson’s agnosticism towards labor as either misguided or a fig leaf to make their book palatable to elected Democrats. To these abundists, downright hostility toward organized labor is often a necessary precondition for abundance.

This anti-union hostility was clear at WelcomeFest—alternatively dubbed “abundance coachella” or “modchella,” after being announced via festival themed promotional poster emblazoned with the slogan “responsibillity [sic] to win”— the self-proclaimed largest gathering of centrist Democrats. There, prominent writer Josh Barro declared that "when I look at policies in New York that stand in the way of Abundance, very often if you look under the hood, you eventually find a labor union at the end that's the driver."

The accusation is clear: unions are behind policies that result in scarcity. Representative Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.), a vocal abundance supporter and speaker on the panel Barro was moderating, mostly demurred, but later posted a video defending unions (Torres is rumored to be a New York gubernatorial aspirant, so asking him to denounce unions was unlikely to pan out). The following day, Barro released an article on his Substack further developing an abundance-flavored broadside against unions. Barro specifically chastised his fellow abundists for shying away from fighting organized labor:

Sometimes the conflict between abundance and the labor movement gets downplayed. If you look up “unions” in the index to Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance, it takes you to their discussion on pages 126-7 of how the use of union labor did not prevent Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro from using regulatory relief to speed the reconstruction of a destroyed interstate underpass. It does not take you to their discussion on page 104 of how local construction trade unions in San Francisco have sought to block the use of cost-saving modular construction in affordable housing projects.

Barro’s point is only unique in its forthrightness, not in its sentiment. In particular, public sector unions—which constitute most of the organized workforce in the United States—are a common target amongst abundance thinkers. The faction’s main organizing group, Inclusive Abundance (whose CEO was also a featured speaker at WelcomeFest, where he dreamed of “college abundist” clubs to rival college Democrats and Republicans), has identified public sector unions as a barrier to their goal of government efficiency, saying, “Public sector unions are resistant to reforms that make performance-based employment decisions easier.”

Jonathan Chait, in The Atlantic, wrote that “progressives are not wrong to see the abundance agenda as a broader attack on their movement. Their theory of American politics depends on empowering the very groups the abundance agenda identifies as the architects of failure and barriers to progress.” Those groups are, namely, environmentalists (broadly the strand of progressives most maligned by abundists), labor, and activist/issue advocacy groups (importantly only the ones to the abundance movement’s left; when it comes to the myriad abundance-focused groups that have sprung up since 2020, it’s a veritable welcomefest).

This led Todd Tucker of the Roosevelt Institute to criticize the abundance agenda’s “survivor island” mindset, where “first unions and Dems team up to vote enviros off the island, and then Dems turn on labor.” Tucker’s point was demonstrated pretty clearly when Matt Yglesias, opining on Barro’s abundance critique of unions, offered his perspective: “[unions] are useful allies against the greater evil of environmentalist organizations.”

Many of the major groups and funders across the abundance landscape have longstanding antipathy towards unions. The most obvious examples are the elements of abundance that are part of the Koch network. Charles Koch (and his late brother David), well known for their hostility to labor and bankrolling champions of euphemistic “right to work” policies like former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, have seeded or funded multiple groups within the abundance movement with track records of hostility towards unions.

• The Foundation for American Innovation (formerly The Lincoln Network) developed a tool that was deployed to entice public sector union members to opt-out by offering incentives like discounts at major retailers.
• The libertarian Reason Institute, partially funded by the Koch-backed Stand Together, frequently publishes pieces citing unions as major obstacles to progress, particularly teachers’ unions.
• The Cato Institute is the preeminent libertarian think tank and, as such, has published many, many pieces arguing against labor unions’ influence. One 2010 publication declared that “collective bargaining is a misguided labor policy because it violates civil liberties and gives unions excessive power to block needed reforms.”
• George Mason University’s Mercatus Center is a bastion of free-market idealism that was established by major donations from the Koch brothers. It has frequently produced scholarship skeptical of unions and their power.
• The Manhattan Institute—also a beneficiary of Koch funding—has a long history of publishing work opposing unions and organized labor.
• Americans for Prosperity, which has been described as the Koch’s “primary political arm,” has been involved in numerous anti-union campaigns and advocacy efforts, including celebrating “right to work” policies. (It has also been hard at work running a $100 million campaign in support of extending the Trump tax cuts this year).
• (A bit of an outlier, The Aspen Institute, which also has been funded by the Kochs and featured David as a board member, has actually worked to ameliorate executives’ hostility to unions.)

Niskanen, which was formed as a splinter group by the more moderate elements of Cato, also frequently criticizes labor.

This is not to say, however, that skepticism of labor is confined to the abundance movement’s libertarian wing. There are multiple examples of center and even center-left elements of the movement centering critiques of labor. Matt Yglesias, who has been described (by Derek Thompson, no less) as “the OG grandfather of abundance,” has been vocally critical of unions on numerous occasions, including criticizing rail unions for pushing for a two-person crew on freight trains.

Democratic Colorado governor Jared Polis, perhaps the most abundance-pilled politician out there, is now infamous for vetoing legislation (unanimously supported by the state’s Democratic legislators) that would have made it easier for workers to unionize.

This tendency was also strikingly apparent when abundance liberals vociferously accused unions of being rentiers when the UAW spoke in support of strategic tariffs.

In fact, some abundists have been pointing to labor as an enemy in their quest for factional power since before Klein and Thompson’s book kickstarted a flurry of discourse. Niskanen, which, as Chait put it, is “the closest thing to an institutional home for the abundance agenda,” published a manifesto in early autumn 2024 that framed public sector unions as an instance of progressives standing in the way of progress, stating:

On the left, conflicts exist [with abundance] wherever progressives pursue their goals through NIMBY-like mechanisms, such as with historic preservation, public employee unions, and organized interests claiming the mantle of environmental justice.

Niskanen’s call for an “abundance faction” goes on to encourage showcasing a “a willingness to pick fights with public sector producer interests like unions” as a plank of their political pitch. Similarly, Ezra Klein’s column “What America Needs is a Liberalism that Builds,” a seminal work in the formation of the abundance perspective, prompted a clash with The American Prospect's David Dayen that focused in large part on requirements that projects use union labor.

That is not to say that abundance and the labor movement can never be allies. Both, for instance, have champions who advocate for bringing parts of project consulting (largely privatized in recent decades) back in-house to government agencies, which could improve cost-efficiency (more building, more abundance!) and create good, stable unionized public servant jobs (more people in the labor movement!).

However, while an alliance makes sense in specific cases, that does not assuage the general friction between the two movements. In fact, one of the earliest critiques of abundance liberalism came from the Manhattan Institute’s Reihan Salam, who doubted that abundance could find traction on the left because it fundamentally challenges the principle of solidarity that has historically undergirded the progressive movement. That insight is key to understanding why, even among abundance proponents who are not opposed to labor, there’s limited interest in building significant camaraderie with the labor movement. Even when labor and abundance are not directly in tension, their organizing principles are.