“Typically, where you have a labor market that has excess demand for workers, what’s needed is for employers to raise wages,” Lopezlira said. In economics, he explained, the “reservation wage” is the wage at which a worker will choose to accept a particular job rather than not work. “The reservation wage has changed for some of these workers.”

The union drive failed, but Jane McAlevey, a labor organizer who has been critical of Biden, told me that his support was “unprecedented, and incredibly important.”

A study by the University of California, Berkeley, from 2015, found that more than half of the 3.7 million people who work in fast food rely on public benefits to survive. Today McDonald’s is one of the five biggest employers whose full-time employees survive on food stamps and Medicaid programs.

In late 2019, the Labor Center at the University of California, Berkeley, released a report estimating that drivers working under Prop. 22 could receive a net wage as low as five dollars and sixty-four cents an hour—less than half the minimum wage in California, and hardly a third of the minimum wage in San Francisco

The story of how Los Angeles teachers’ unions rebuilt their union is the crown-jewel chapter of McAlevey’s newest book, “A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing and the Fight for Democracy.” McAlevey, who is the strike correspondent for The Nation and a senior policy fellow at the U.C. Berkeley Labor Center, is both a coach of today’s labor movement and a chronicler of its key plays.