But viewed through another lens, this is an optimistic moment. The federal government isn’t the only game in town. Union approval sits near a half-century high—roughly seven in ten Americans—worker organizing is climbing, and state and local governments are moving on workers’ rights with real dynamism.
The most encouraging story of 2026 isn’t only that states passed good laws (though they did plenty of that, as we outline in a new issue brief). It’s that a growing number are building the muscle to enforce them—putting money, prosecutors, and real teeth behind labor standards just as federal enforcement collapses.
The sharpest edge is criminal prosecution. If an employee steals from an employer, no one questions whether criminal prosecution is appropriate. But historically, when an employer has stolen workers’ wages, even repeatedly, intentionally, and egregiously, that has been treated as a civil matter. This is changing, as a growing number of district attorneys have added labor to the docket. One day before his office convicted Donald Trump, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced guilty pleas in a wage theft case against the owners of famed pizzeria Grimaldi’s. And prosecutors are bringing workplace fatality cases that once went largely unpunished: In Travis County, Texas, District Attorney José Garza secured a guilty plea from a construction company over the trench-collapse death of 24-year-old Juan José Galvan Batalla, with the plea agreement requiring worker trainings and an independent safety monitor.
Well over two dozen localities now run offices dedicated to workers—the newest in Cleveland, and the original in San Francisco, marking its twenty-fifth anniversary this year. Enforcement by Denver Labor and the San Francisco City Attorney has reclassified thousands of gig workers at staffing businesses as employees with wage and other rights. Boston passed a construction and demolition ordinance requiring extensive safety measures as a precondition for getting a large-scale building permit in the first place.
States and localities also shape the economy as purchasers and regulators. When a business wants a license, permit, tax incentive, or government contract, that’s leverage to demand legal compliance and, ideally, good working conditions. Some cities and counties block repeat wage thieves from bidding on government contracts, and many jurisdictions set prevailing- or living-wage standards for government contractors, so bad apple bidders can’t win by offering bargain-basement working conditions.
On the most fundamental right—to organize and join unions—states have less leeway, because federal law constrains their powers. But there’s still tremendous untapped opportunity for action, including granting organizing rights to state and local public employees, but also going far beyond that. Illinois this year gave rideshare drivers a path to unionize, joining California (by statute in 2025) and Massachusetts (by ballot initiative in 2024). Washington and Oregon last year followed New York and New Jersey in allowing striking workers to receive unemployment benefits. Minnesota’s Nursing Home Workforce Standards Board lets workers, employers, and the labor commissioner negotiate binding standards for an entire industry—the “sectoral bargaining” that labor experts have long lauded, and that should be replicated many times over.
The dynamism on worker issues isn’t evenly spread. You’ll have noticed perhaps that every state mentioned above is a blue one. In red America, some leaders remain indifferent or even hostile to their own constituents. One illustrative recent example: Nebraska’s attorney general just filed a lawsuit to keep wages lower, hot on the heels of state lawmakers moving to weaken voter-approved ballot initiatives raising the minimum wage.
The constellation of pro-worker state and local action isn’t just a scatter of separate dots. There’s a trendline, and a lesson.
Strategists are drafting national blueprints for 2028; but for workers, the real blueprint is already an iterative work in progress closer to home.
So this Labor Day, the charge runs both ways: To leaders at every level, examine the full powers of your office and use them for working people—even if your office isn’t nominally about labor; even if your predecessor did nothing for workers. And to the rest of us: Expect and demand more from state and local leaders than annual Labor Day platitudes. The best way to gain and exert power—for workers, and for cities and states—has always been to use it.
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