Future of Work Initiative

The Aspen Business Roundtable on Organized Labor is a private network of CEOs, founders, investors, and other business leaders reinventing corporate America’s relationship with organized labor.

This playbook includes strategies for leaders hoping to strengthen their workplaces by empowering their employees.

In 2025, the labor landscape is undergoing a seismic shift. According to Brunswick Group’s latest research, the traditional playbook for engaging working-class workers—especially younger ones—is rapidly becoming obsolete.

Panel discussion at Aspen Ideas 2024. Renewed efforts to expand participation, representation and shared decision-making at work may offer a framework to rebuild faith in democracy.

We heard from a new wave of business leaders who understand they need to reimagine their relationship with organized workers and from the leader of the biggest federation of unions, who is ready to innovate and work together with business to achieve shared prosperity.

Workers across a wide breadth of sectors are striking for increased wages — but also for dignity, equity, and a say in how new technologies are deployed.

“The very same relationships that have a lot of conflict also can have a lot of collaboration, because you have two parties that have power and that are peers in dialogue with one another,” Bahat says. “One of the major issues I see in our American economy is that the power went out of balance. It needs to go back into balance.”

As the CEO of the first U.S. bank to unionize in over 40 years, I learned firsthand that it doesn’t need to be this way. In fact, if business leaders want happy employees and good business outcomes, they’ll need to embrace a more collaborative and compassionate approach–one centered on worker empowerment.

In the first piece of its kind in the pages of Harvard Business Review in over 30 years, Roundtable principals draw from learnings from the first year of the Roundtable to argue that the time has come for management to learn how to work with, rather than against, organized labor – and outline steps leaders can take to do just that.

Rethink how ideas of power and our relationship to work and the workplace could help inform better decision-making and ultimately create prosperity for everyone.

For libertarian think tank Niskanen Center’s series on how best to leverage current organizing momentum to grow the influence of unions and workers, EOP Fellow Liba Wenig Rubenstein and Roundtable chair Roy Bahat offer an alternative to a zero-sum view of the business-labor relationship.

In 2022, workers in the United States voted to form more unions than they have in nearly 20 years, and labor has recently organized at companies in almost every industry.

Labor hasn’t won many battles since the day that President Reagan fired thousands of air traffic controllers for striking in 1981. What happens between UPS and the Teamsters in 2023 “is going to help set the tone for other things,” he says.