On a July weekend in Tijuana, in 1924, Caesar Cardini was in trouble. Prohibition was driving celebrities, rich people, and alcoholics across the border from San Diego, and Cardini’s highly popular Italian restaurant was swamped. Low on ingredients, or so the legend goes, he tossed together what he had on hand: romaine lettuce, Parmesan cheese, and croutons, dressed in a slurry of egg, oil, garlic, salt, Worcestershire sauce, and citrus juice. It was a perfect food.
On a November evening in Brooklyn, in 2023, I was in trouble (hungry). I ordered a kale Caesar at a place I like. Instead, I got: a tangle of kale, pickled red onion, and “sweet and spicy almonds,” dressed in a thinnish, vaguely savory liquid and topped with a glob of crème fraîche roughly the size and vibe of a golf ball. It was a pretty weird food.
We are living through an age of unchecked Caesar-salad fraud. Putative Caesars are dressed with yogurt or miso or tequila or lemongrass; they are served with zucchini, orange zest, pig ear, kimchi, poached duck egg, roasted fennel, fried chickpeas, buffalo-cauliflower fritters, tōgarashi-dusted rice crackers. They are missing anchovies, or croutons, or even lettuce. In October, the food magazine Delicious posted a list of “Caesar” recipes that included variations with bacon, maple syrup, and celery; asparagus, fava beans, smoked trout, and dill; and tandoori prawns, prosciutto, kale chips, and mung-bean sprouts. The so-called Caesar at Kitchen Mouse Cafe, in Los Angeles, includes “pickled carrot, radish & coriander seeds, garlicky croutons, crispy oyster mushrooms, lemon dressing.” Molly Baz is a chef, a cookbook author, and a bit of a Caesar obsessive—she owns a pair of sneakers with cae on one tongue and sal on the other—and she put it succinctly when she told me, “There’s been a lot of liberties taken, for better or for worse.”
It’s all a little peculiar, at least in the sense that words are supposed to mean something. Imagine ordering a “hamburger” that contained a bun and some lettuce, with chicken, marinara sauce, and basil Mad-Libbed between. Or cacio e pepe with, say, carrots and Christmas ham. To be clear, modifying the Caesar isn’t fundamentally a bad thing, as long as the flavors resemble those of the original. Baz likes her Caesar with anchovies (traditional! controversial! correct!) but said she’s happy to swap in fish sauce, capers, or “other salty, briny things.” Jacob Sessoms, a restaurant chef in Asheville, North Carolina, told me he doesn’t mind an alternative green but draws the line at, say, pomegranate seeds. Jason Kaplan, the CEO of a restaurant-consulting firm in New York, doesn’t mind a miso Caesar. “Because of the saltiness and the complexity, because it’s a fermented soybean paste, you know?” he told me. “That doesn’t piss me off as much as somebody saying that ‘this is a Caesar salad,’ when clearly there’s nothing to say it’s even closely related.”
The Caesar’s mission creep toward absurdity began long before the tequila and the fava beans. In fact, it has been going on for decades—first slowly, then quickly, swept along by and reflective of many of the biggest shifts in American dining. Michael Whiteman is a consultant whose firm helped open restaurants such as Windows on the World and the Rainbow Room, in New York. He remembers first seeing the Caesar start to meaningfully change about 40 years ago, when “hot things on cold things” became trendy among innovative California restaurants, and his friend James Beard returned from a trip out West raving about a Caesar topped with fried chicken livers. This was also, notably, the era of the power lunch, when restaurant chefs needed dishes that were hearty but still lunchtime-light, and quick to prepare. The chicken Caesar started appearing on menus, Whiteman told me, followed by the steak Caesar, and “it went downhill from there.”
In the 1980s and ’90s, as advances in agriculture, shipping, and food culture increased Americans’ access to a variety of produce, chefs started swapping out the traditional romaine for whatever the leafy green of the moment was: little gem, arugula, frisée. At that point, the Caesar was still found mostly in Italian American and New American restaurants. But as “fusion” took hold and culinary nationalism abated, the Caesar became a staple of Mexican American and Asian American chain restaurants, zhuzhed up with tortilla strips or wontons for a mainstream dining public who wanted something different yet familiar.
More recently, stunt food has come for the Caesar. “We’re living in a period of extreme eating, meaning extreme in terms of outlandish,” Whiteman told me, in which “innovation for its own sake” seems to be motivating chefs and restaurants up and down the price spectrum. Whiteman calls the resulting dishes “mutants.”
To some degree, the reason for all of this experimentation is obvious: Caesar salads—even bastardized ones—rock, and people want to buy them. “Isn’t it perhaps kind of the case that the Caesar salad might be close to the perfect dish?” Sessoms said. “It hits all of your dopamine receptors that are palate related, with umami, fat, and tons of salt.”
The Caesar is a crowd-pleaser salad, a name-brand salad, a safe-bet salad. It’s also a format that allows for a sort of low-stakes novelty. That helps explain the rise of the fake Caesar too. Though demand for restaurants has generally bounced back since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, labor and ingredient costs are much higher than they were four years ago. Just like Caesar Cardini before them, chefs are looking for relatively cheap, relatively fast dishes, and creative ones are looking for classics they can riff on without alienating customers. “Would untrained American eaters be more likely to order a Caesar salad than any other salad? Yes,” Sessoms said. Sometimes, when he’s trying to find a use for specialty greens—celtuce, radicchio—he’ll douse them in Caesar dressing to get diners to order them.
At the same time, Kaplan told me, it’s hard to overestimate how important the widespread adoption of the online menu has been over the past decade or so. Recognizable favorites sell. When diners can see what’s available before they make a reservation or leave the house, the menu is as much an advertisement as a utilitarian document. Appending the name “Caesar” to a salad is a shortcut to broad appeal.
Last week, I called up Stewart Gary, the culinary director of Nitehawk Cinema, the Brooklyn dine-in movie theater where I ordered that almond-and-pickled-onion salad. He told me essentially the same thing: In his line of work, people have limited time with the menu, and Caesar is a useful signifier. “Look,” he said. “If we called it a kale salad with anchovy dressing, no one would order it.”
Ancient philosophers were bedeviled by the question of whether the ship of Theseus retained its fundamental essence after each of its component parts was replaced one by one over the course of centuries. I’ve been thinking about salads for a few weeks now and feel pretty sure that a true Caesar requires, at minimum, garlic, acid, umami, cold leaves, hard cheese, and a crunchy, croutonlike product. Beyond that, you can get away with one or maybe two wacky additions before you start straining the limits of credibility. It’s about principle, not pedantry.
Besides, the more you learn about Caesar salads, the more you come to realize that pedantry is useless. The original Caesar was reportedly made with lime juice instead of lemon. It was prepared tableside and intended to be eaten by hand, like a piece of toast, “arranged on each plate so that you could pick up a leaf by its short end and chew it down bit by bit, then pick up another,” as Julia Child and Jacques Pépin explained in their version of the recipe. It was meant to be dressed in stages, first with oil, then with acid, then with a coddled egg (to coat the lettuce leaves, so the cheese would stick to them), not with the emulsified, mayonnaise-adjacent dressing common today. Crucially, it didn’t have whole anchovies.
As soon as the recipe began showing up in cookbooks, in the early 1940s, it started changing: Some recipes called for rubbing the bowl with garlic, or adding blue cheese or pear vinegar or mustard. In her headnotes for one of the earliest printed versions of the Caesar recipe, published in West Coast Cook Book, in 1952, Helen Evans Brown described the Caesar as “the most talked-of salad of a decade, perhaps of the century.” She then went on to note that “the salad is at its best when kept simple, but as it is invariably made at table, and sometimes by show-offs, it occasionally contains far too many ingredients.” The Caesar is forever, which means it’s forever being manipulated. For better and for worse.
In the fall of 2021, Gabriel Arias felt like his body was “rotting from the inside.” He was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, a form of blood cancer so aggressive that doctors had him hospitalized the day of his biopsy. In cases like his, the ideal treatment is a transplant. Arias’s cancer-prone blood cells needed to be destroyed and replaced with healthy ones taken from the bone marrow or blood of a donor who matched him biologically. Fortunately, doctors found him a match in the volunteer-donor registries—a man in Poland. Unfortunately, Arias’s single match in the entire world was no longer available to donate.
In the past, the road to transplant might have ended here, but a medical advance had dramatically expanded the pool of donors for patients such as Arias. With the right drug, Arias could now get a transplant from his brother, a partial match, or, as he ultimately chose, he could join a clinical trial in which his donor would be a stranger who shared just eight of 10 markers used in bone-marrow transplants. Under this looser standard, Arias’s registry matches multiplied from one to more than 200. “It really is a game changer,” says Steve Devine, the chief medical officer of NMDP, a nonprofit that runs a donor registry. Today, agonizing searches for a matched donor are largely a thing of the past.
The drug powering this breakthrough is actually very old. Cyclophosphamide was first developed in the 1950s for chemotherapy. Fifty years later, researchers at Johns Hopkins began studying whether it could be repurposed to prevent a common and sometimes deadly complication of bone-marrow transplants called graft-versus-host disease, where the donor’s white blood cells—which form the recipient’s new immune system—attack the rest of the body as foreign. The bigger the mismatch between donor and recipient, the more likely this was to happen. Cyclophosphamide worked stunningly well against graft-versus-host disease: The drug cut rates of acute and severe complications by upwards of 80 percent.
Cyclophosphamide has now enabled more patients than ever to get bone-marrow transplants —more than 7,000 last year, according to NMDP. (Bone-marrow transplant is still used as an umbrella term, though many of these procedures now use cells collected from the blood rather than bone marrow, which can be done without surgery. Both versions are also known, more accurately, as hematopoietic or blood stem-cell transplants.) The field has essentially surmounted the problem of matching donors, a major barrier to transplants, Ephraim Fuchs, an oncologist at Johns Hopkins University, told me. Fuchs couldn’t remember the last time a patient failed to get a blood stem-cell transplant because they couldn’t find a donor.
It wasn’t obvious that cyclophosphamide would work so well. “I’m just going to come clean,” Devine told me. “Back in 2003 and 2005, I thought it was crazy.” Derived from a relative of mustard gas, the drug is known to be highly toxic to a variety of blood cells; in fact, doctors had long used it to kill the diseased bone marrow in patients before transplant. Why would you want to give such a drug after transplant, when the new donor cells are still precious and few? It defied a certain logic.
But as far back as the 1960s, researchers also noticed that high doses of post-transplant cyclophosphamide could prevent graft-versus-host disease in mice, even if they did not know why. Over the next few decades, scientists working away in labs learned that cyclophosphamide isn’t quite carpet-bombing the blood. It actually spares the stem cells most important to successful transplant. (Blood stem cells differentiate into all the types of red and white blood cells that a patient will need.) Why cyclophosphamide works so well against graft-versus-host disease is still unclear, but the drug also seems to selectively kill white blood cells active in the disease while sparing those that quell the immune system.
By the late ’90s, doctors saw a clear need to expand the search for donors. Bone-marrow transplants are most successful when donor and recipient share the same markers, known as HLA, which are protein tags our cells use to distinguish self from nonself. We inherit HLA markers from our parents, so siblings have about a one-in-four chance of being perfectly matched. As families got smaller in the 20th century, though, the likelihood of a sibling match fell. Donor registries such as NMDP were created to fill the gap, however imperfectly.
Doctors soon began coalescing around the idea of using family members who were only haploidentical, or half matched, meaning they shared at least five out of 10 HLA markers. Every child is a half match to their parents, and every parent to their child; siblings also have a 50 percent chance of being half matches. But when doctors first tried these transplants, the “outcomes were horrible,” Leo Luznik, an oncologist at Johns Hopkins, told me. Patients had frighteningly high rates of graft-versus-host disease, and more than half died within three years.
Based on the lab findings, Luznik, Fuchs, and other colleagues at Johns Hopkins wondered if post-transplant cyclophosphamide could help. The pharmaceutical companies that made it were uninterested in funding any research, Luznik said, because “it was an old, very cheap drug.” With government grants, however, the team was able to prove that cyclophosphamide got the rate of graft-versus-disease as low as in matched sibling transplants. By the late 2000s, transplants with half-matched family members were becoming routine.
Still, not every patient will have a sibling or parent or child who can donate. Doctors began wondering if cyclophosphamide could work for unrelated donors too. If only eight of the 10 markers have to be matched, then almost everyone would find a donor, even multiple donors. This was especially important for patients of mixed or non-European ancestry, who have a harder time finding unrelated donors, because people of those backgrounds make up a smaller proportion of registry donors and because they can carry a more diverse set of HLA markers. Two-thirds of white people can find a fully matched registry donor, but that number drops to 23 percent for Black Americans and 41 percent for Asians or Pacific Islanders.
Amelia Johnson, who is half Indian and half Black, was one of the first children to get a transplant from a mismatched unrelated donor in a clinical trial in 2022. Her mom, Salome Sookdieopersad, remembers being told, “You guys need to start recruiting bone-marrow donors to help increase your chances.” When that still didn’t turn up an ideal match, Sookdieopersad prepared to donate to her daughter as a half match. But then Amelia was offered a spot in the clinical trial, and they decided to take it. Transplants with mismatched unrelated donors had already been tried in adults—that was Arias’s trial—and they offered other potential benefits. A younger donor, for example, has younger cells, which fare noticeably better than older ones. Amelia did end up with a bout of graft-versus-host disease; cyclophosphamide lowers the risk but not to zero. Still, the transplant was necessary to save her life, and her mom pointed out that some risk was unavoidable, no matter the type of donor: A friend of Amelia’s got graft-versus-host even with a perfectly matched one. Doctors were able to treat Amelia’s complications, and she returned to school last August. The pediatric trial she was part of is ongoing.
In adults, where more data are available, doctors are already moving ahead with mismatched, unrelated donors. Between this and half-matched family members, patients who once might have had zero donors are now finding themselves with multiple possibilities. Doctors can be choosier too: They can select the youngest donor, for example, or match on characteristics such as blood type. The larger pool of donors also prevents situations like Arias’s, in which a single matched donor who signed up years ago is no longer available, which happens with some regularity. Cyclophosphamide is now routinely used in matched transplants too, because it lowers the risk of graft-versus-host disease even further.
Arias’s mismatched unrelated donor in the trial was an anonymous 22-year-old man who lives somewhere in the United States. When Arias and I spoke last month, it had been almost exactly two years since his transplant. He’s cancer free. He and his wife just welcomed a baby girl. None of this would have likely been possible without the transplant, without the donor, without a 70-year-old drug that had been smartly repurposed.
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Updated at 6:17 p.m. ET on April 16, 2024
Donald Trump is among the most famous and most polarizing people alive. The task of selecting 12 impartial jurors who can render a fair verdict in the criminal trial of a former president is a first for America’s court system.
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
Yesterday, jury selection began in Donald Trump’s first criminal trial, and today, seven jurors were selected. The New York trial, centered on accusations that Trump falsified business records to conceal a hush-money payment to the porn star Stormy Daniels, may be the only of Trump’s various legal cases to wrap up before the November election. Many Americans are set on their hopes for the trial’s outcome before it begins, which makes finding impartial jurors a real challenge. Ninety-six potential jurors were called into the courtroom yesterday—an unusually large number—and more than half of them quickly raised their hand to say they couldn’t be impartial and thus needed to be dismissed. Some prospective jurors who had indicated yesterday that they could be impartial changed their mind today.
The task of the judge is not necessarily to select people who have no feelings about Trump—that’s near-impossible. Rather, the point is to select people who can be impartial (about both Trump and other potential witnesses), listen to evidence, and follow the law and the rules given by the court, Sharon Fairley, a professor from practice at the University of Chicago Law School, told me. The jurors selected so far, whose names haven’t been released, reportedly include a young corporate lawyer, a man originally from Ireland who works in sales, and a young Black woman who said that some of her friends have strong opinions about the former president but that she is not a political person.
Criminal convictions, Fairley reminded me, require a unanimous decision from the jury. So Trump’s lawyers are likely hoping for even a single holdout—a person who is independent in their thinking and perhaps not a stickler for following rules. The government’s lawyers, for their part, are likely looking for people who are intelligent and discerning, who believe in the rule of law, and who are able to see through the “smoke and mirrors” that the Trump defense may introduce to the courtroom, Fairley said. Lawyers from either side can dismiss 10 potential jurors for any reason (so far, both Trump’s lawyers and the prosecution have done this with six potential jurors). Beyond that, Fairley explained, the judge has discretion in selecting people who he feels could credibly set aside personal feelings to render a fair judgment.
Trump has held tight to his narrative that this trial is a politically motivated “witch hunt,” a tactic that will only add to the court’s unique challenges here. Usually, the prosecution is more likely to generate publicity about criminal trials than the defense, Valerie Hans, a law professor at Cornell University, told me in an email—most defendants do not “have the public microphone of Donald Trump.” Already, Hans noted, one prosecutor, Joshua Steinglass, has been trying to draw a distinction for prospective jurors between what they have seen about the trial in the news and the actual evidence that they will go on to see.
Part of the court’s challenge is weeding out people who are actually able to be impartial versus those who say they are because they want to get on the jury for their own reasons, James J. Sample, a law professor at Hofstra University, told me in an email. Ideological jurors could come from either side, Sample noted: “Yes, Manhattan is mostly blue. But might there be one true believer who wants to cement themselves as a MAGA hero? Absolutely.”
How each prospective juror voted will be of interest to lawyers on either side, but it likely won’t be the deciding factor in who gets placed on the jury—and lawyers aren’t allowed to ask that question directly. Justice Juan M. Merchan’s 42 questions for would-be jurors, including ones about whether they are part of advocacy groups or have attended campaign events for Trump (or anti-Trump groups), “suggest an attempt to find a reasonable middle ground here—not ruling out anyone who has some views on Trump or disqualifying them based on their vote in 2020 or 2016, but also making sure they’re not rah-rah activists either for or against,” my colleague David Graham told me.
There’s also a simple irony at the core of this whole process: The type of person best suited to be a thoughtful and credible juror in this case will almost by definition know something about Donald Trump. “A hypothetical juror who had never heard of Mr. Trump at all,” Sample acknowledged, “would be such an uninformed citizen as to be of suspect legitimacy from the jump.”
The trial is expected to last about six weeks (though it could take longer). After the rest of the jury is chosen, the trial proceedings will kick off in earnest, with former Trump-world figures including Michael Cohen and possibly even Stormy Daniels herself expected to testify. But in the meantime, the public and the defendant (who seemed to nod off on the first day) will need to sit through more of the same. As David told me, “Monday’s start to the trial was both huge in historic terms and mostly very boring in substance.”
The U.S. Supreme Court justices considered whether the Justice Department can charge January 6 defendants with violating an obstruction statute—a decision that could affect the election-interference case against Donald Trump.
Israel’s military chief said yesterday that Iran’s recent strike “will be met with a response” but did not specify a timeline or the scale of a retaliatory attack.
A federal appeals court ruled that a West Virginia law, which bans transgender girls and women from playing on certain sports teams, violates the Title IX rights of a teen athlete.
Evening Read
Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.
What Happens When You’ve Been on Ozempic for 20 Years?
By Gary Taubes
Of all the wonder drugs in the history of medicine, insulin may be the closest parallel, in both function and purpose, to this century’s miracle of a metabolic drug: the GLP-1 agonist. Sold under now-familiar brand names including Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro, these new medications for diabetes and obesity have been hailed as a generational breakthrough that may one day stand with insulin therapy among “the greatest advances in the annals of chronic disease,” as The New Yorker put it in December.
But if that analogy is apt—and the correspondences are many—then a more complicated legacy for GLP-1 drugs could be in the works. Insulin, for its part, may have changed the world of medicine, but it also brought along a raft of profound, unintended consequences …
With the sudden rise of GLP-1 drugs in this decade, I worry that a similar set of transformations could occur.
Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Courtesy of the author; FPG / Getty; Tom Kelley / Getty.
Care for a loved one. With the right amount of self-awareness, you can learn parenting lessons from raising a dog, Kate Cray writes.
Watch.Recent prestige TV shows have featured difficult men: heroes who are resolutely alienated, driven to acts of violence they don’t want to inflict and can’t enjoy, Sophie Gilbert writes.
Last year was widely hailed as a breakthrough for the American worker. Amid a historically hot labor market, the United Auto Workers and Hollywood writers’ and actors’ guilds launched high-profile strikes that made front-page news and resulted in significant victories. Strikes, organizing efforts, and public support for unions reached heights not seen since the 1960s. Two in three Americans support unions, and 59 percent say they would be in favor of unionizing their own workplace. And Joe Biden supports organized labor more vocally than any other president in recent memory. You could look at all this and say that the U.S. labor movement is stronger than it has been in decades.
But you could just as easily say that worker powerin America is as low as it has been in nearly a century. Despite all the headlines and good feeling, a mere 10 percent of American workers belong to unions. In the private sector, the share is just 6 percent. After years of intense media attention and dogged organizing efforts, workers at Amazon, Starbucks, and Trader Joe’s still don’t have a contract, or even the start of negotiations to get one. Union membership is associated with higher earnings, better benefits, stable hours, protection from arbitrary discipline, and more—but most Americans haven’t had the chance to experience these advantages firsthand. In 2023, according to an estimate by the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank, 60 million working people in this country wanted a union but couldn’t get one.
How can this be? The answer, as I learned during my 25 years working for the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest federation of unions, is that the story of organized labor in America is really two stories. On the one hand, established unions—especially those that emerged in the 1930s, when labor protections were at their most robust and expansive—are thriving. On the other hand, workers who want to unionize for the first time can’t get their efforts off the ground.
This is because the legal and policy shifts that hobbled the American labor movement were not primarily aimed at dismantling existing unions, at least not right away. Rather, they were designed to make it difficult to form new ones. Those efforts worked. In 1954, 16 million working people belonged to a union, and they accounted for about a third of the workforce. Today, nearly as many people are in unions—about 14 million—but they make up only 10 percent of the workforce. In other words, the numerator of unionized workers has held steady even as the denominator of overall jobs in the economy has grown dramatically. And all the support from the public and even the president can’t do much to change that. As hopeful as today’s moment might seem for workers, those hopes will not be realized without reversing the changes that laid unions low in the first place.
A century ago, an even smaller portion of the workforce belonged to a union than does today, and it showed. Then, as now, income inequality had reached staggering heights. Industrial workplaces of the 1920s were police states, with corporate spy agencies, private armies, and company stores.
The tide shifted in workers’ favor during the Great Depression. In 1935, responding to years of rising labor militancy, Congress passed the Wagner Act, an integral part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal agenda. The law gave working people robust rights to form and join labor unions and to take collective action, such as strikes. It created the National Labor Relations Board, tasked with ensuring that employers didn’t violate these rights. And it declared that protecting “the free flow of commerce” also meant protecting the “full freedom” of working people to organize. Overall union membership rose from just 11 percent of the workforce in 1934 to 34 percent in 1945.
Then the tide shifted back. After the Congress of Industrial Organizations began organizing multiracial unions in the South, segregationist Southern Democrats, whose votes had been crucial for passing the Wagner Act, joined forces with pro-corporate Republicans to stymie the New Deal labor agenda. This effort culminated in the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which stripped key labor protections from the Wagner Act. President Harry Truman denounced the bill as “a shocking piece of legislation” that would “take fundamental rights away from our working people.” But the Senate overrode his veto.
Taft-Hartley marked the beginning of the end of America’s short-lived period of strong organized-labor rights. It allowed states to pass “right to work” laws that let workers free-ride on union benefits without paying dues, which would help keep southern states low-wage and non-union. Taft-Hartley made it a crime for workers to join together across employers in “sympathy strikes” (unlike in Sweden, where postal workers refused last year to deliver license plates as a show of support for striking Tesla workers), or even across workplaces in the same industry. It also included anti-communist provisions that led to a purge of many of the labor movement’s most effective organizers, especially those most successful in promoting multiracial organizing. Taken together, these changes choked off the growth of working-class solidarity that was flourishing in other Western democracies at the time.
Taft-Hartley did not immediately doom the labor movement, however. It was more like a time bomb. Established unions remained strong and popular for decades, boosted by the conventional wisdom that a careful balance between labor and capital was the goose laying the postwar golden eggs. As Dwight Eisenhower wrote to his brother in 1954, “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.”
The time bomb finally began to go off in the 1970s, when a confluence of factors—the stagflation crisis, the rise of Milton Friedman–style economic theory, the fracturing of the Democratic coalition—made anti-union policy much more politically viable. And corruption in some unions, laid bare by high-profile congressional hearings, cast doubt on the integrity of unions generally. Richard Nixon appointed pro-corporate justices to the Supreme Court who over the following decades would dilute labor protections even further than Taft-Hartley had. And in 1981, Ronald Reagan crushed the air-traffic-controller strike, signaling that the federal government would tolerate aggressive union-busting actions by employers. This in turn gave birth to a new “union avoidance” consulting business that taught bosses how to exploit the vulnerabilities that had been injected into labor law. Those vulnerabilities turned out to be extensive.
During the period between the passage of the Wagner Act and Taft-Hartley, union organizing was relatively straightforward. Organizers would typically distribute cards to rank-and-file activists, who would collect signatures and return them to the organizers, who would file the signed cards with the NLRB. If a majority of a workplace signed the cards, the NLRB would certify the union. During bargaining, if the company and the union couldn’t reach agreement, the workers had various ways of exerting leverage, including calling a sit-down strike or blocking the employer’s goods from being accepted at other workplaces.
Today, even if a majority of workers sign union cards, the union has to win an NLRB election to be recognized. This process does not much resemble the free and fair elections we vote in every other November. The company can hire anti-union consultants, who will advise doing everything possible to delay that election, giving management time to intensify its lobbying efforts to scare employees out of voting yes. Thanks to Taft-Hartley’s so-called free-speech clause, employers have a broad range of tactics to choose from. For instance, although they are not technically allowed to threaten to close a warehouse if workers unionize, they can “predict” that the warehouse will have to close if the union goes through. They can make employees attend anti-union propaganda meetings during work hours, and they don’t have to let union organizers set foot in the parking lot to respond.
If a union overcomes these obstacles to win majority support, corporate higher-ups, though technically obligated to bargain in good faith, can drag their heels on contract negotiations with few repercussions. This helps explain why the Amazon Labor Union—which was founded in Staten Island in April 2021 and recognized by the NLRB in April 2022— still doesn’t appear close to having a contract. Labor might be regaining its cultural cachet, but after the triumphant vote is complete and the news cameras go away, employers hold almost all the cards.
This dynamic, rather than economic or technological shifts, is the key reason workers in more recently established industries are not organized. If Uber and Lyft had been invented in the 1930s, there would be a large, powerful Rideshare Drivers’ Union. If movies had been invented in the 2020s, the notion of an actors’ guild or a screenwriters’ union would seem absurd to most people. There is nothing more inherently “unionizable” about one job versus another.
Organized labor could still make a true comeback, one reflected not just in public goodwill but in actual union jobs. The Protecting the Rights to Organize Act, first introduced in 2019, is a comprehensive effort to restore the balance of power in the workplace—repealing much of the Taft-Hartley Act, including its so-called right-to-work provisions and its ban on solidarity actions. The PRO Act passed the House, but stalled in the Senate when a few Democratic senators refused to back filibuster-reform efforts in 2021.
The PRO Act is a strong bill, and I fought for it during my time as political director of the AFL-CIO. But one of the lessons of the American labor movement is that legal change tends to follow cultural change. Recent trends are encouraging. Biden brags about being the first president to visit a picket line, and Trump, despite having pursued anti-labor policies while president, at least feels the need to try to appear pro-union. At the same time, with less fanfare, the strategic effort to dilute worker power continues apace: Red-state legislatures are rolling back basic labor laws, including those that protect children, and Amazon, Starbucks, SpaceX, and Trader Joe’s have asked the the Supreme Court to declare the NLRB unconstitutional.
The paradox is that it’s hard for labor law to become a top-tier political issue precisely because so few Americans have firsthand experience with union membership, or recognize what they have to gain from resetting the balance of power between workers and corporations. Overcoming that challenge requires recovering the wisdom that created the modern labor movement: that the fate of working people anywhere is the fate of working people everywhere. It happened once, nearly a century ago. The country was a very different place back then. But, for better and for worse, it was also much the same.
Chinese electric vehicles—cheap, stylish, and high quality—should be a godsend to the Biden administration, whose two biggest priorities are reducing carbon emissions quickly enough to avert a climate catastrophe and reducing consumer prices quickly enough to avert an electoral catastrophe. Instead, the White House is going out of its way to keep Chinese EVs out of the U.S. What gives?
The key to understanding this seeming contradiction is something known as “the China shock.” American policy makers long considered free trade to be close to an unalloyed good. But, according to a hugely influential 2016 paper, the loosening of trade restrictions with China at the turn of the 21st century was a disaster for the American manufacturing workforce. Consumers got cheap toys and clothes, but more than 2 million workers lost their jobs, and factory towns across the country fell into ruin. Laterresearch found that, in 2016, Donald Trump overperformed in counties that had been hit hardest by the China shock, helping him win key swing states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
Upon taking office, the Biden administration committed itself to making sure nothing like this would happen again. It kept in place many of Donald Trump’s tariffs on China and even introduced new trade restrictions of its own. Meanwhile, it pushed legislation through Congress that invested trillions of dollars to boost domestic manufacturing. For Biden, the transition to green energy represented a chance to bring good jobs back to the places that had been hurt the most by free trade.
Then China became an EV powerhouse overnight and made everything much more complicated. As recently as 2020, China produced very few electric vehicles and exported hardly any of them. Last year, more than 8 million EVs were sold in China, compared with 1.4 million in the U.S. The Chinese market has been driven mostly by a single brand, BYD, which recently surpassed Tesla to become the world’s largest producer of electric vehicles. BYD cars are well built, full of high-tech features, and dirt cheap. The least expensive EV available in America retails for about $30,000. BYD’s base model goes for less than $10,000 in China and, without tariffs, would probably sell for about $20,000 in the U.S., according to industry experts.
This leaves the White House in a bind. A flood of ultracheap Chinese EVs would save Americans a ton of money at a time when people—voters—are enraged about high prices generally and car prices in particular. And it would accelerate the transition from gas-powered cars to EVs, drastically lowering emissions in the process. But it would also likely force American carmakers to close factories and lay off workers, destroying a crucial source of middle-class jobs in a prized American industry—one that just so happens to be concentrated in a handful of swing states. The U.S. could experience the China shock all over again. “It’s a Faustian bargain,” David Autor, an economist at MIT and one of the authors of the original China-shock paper, told me. “There are few things that would decarbonize the U.S. faster than $20,000 EVs. But there is probably nothing that would kill the U.S. auto industry faster, either.”
The president has chosen which end of the bargain he’s willing to take. The Biden administration has left in place a 25 percent tariff on all Chinese vehicles (a measure initiated by Donald Trump), which has kept most Chinese EVs out of the U.S. even as they are selling like crazy in Europe. That probably won’t hold off Chinese EVs forever, which is why the administration is contemplating furtherrestrictions. “China is determined to dominate the future of the auto market, including by using unfair practices,” Biden said in a statement in February. “I’m not going to let that happen on my watch.”
One view of this approach is that Biden is choosing to sabotage his own climate goals by cynically pandering to a tiny group of swing voters. As Vox’s Dylan Matthews has observed, less than 1 percent of Americans work directly in the auto industry, whereas more than 90 percent of American households have a car.
The Biden administration, unsurprisingly, sees the situation differently. Biden’s team starts from the premise that decarbonizing the U.S. economy will be a decades-long effort requiring sustained political buy-in from the public. Chinese EVs might lower emissions in the short term, but the resulting backlash could help elect Trump and other Republicans intent on rolling back the Biden administration’s hard-won climate achievements. Keeping out Chinese EVs now, in other words, may be necessary to save the planet later.
“We ran this experiment before,” Jennifer Harris, who served as the senior director for international economics in the Biden administration, told me, referring to the first China shock. “We saw whole industries shift overseas, and Trump rode those grievances right to the White House. And last time I checked, he didn’t do much decarbonizing.” Already, Trump is trying to turn Chinese EVs into a wedge issue in the 2024 election; his recent “bloodbath” comments were a reference to what would happen to America if Chinese cars were allowed into the country.
That doesn’t mean the Biden administration is giving up on an electric-vehicle future; it just means that future will need to be built at home instead of imported from abroad. Threading that needle won’t be easy. Apart from Tesla, American automakers still make the bulk of their profits selling gas-powered pickup trucks and SUVs while bleeding money on EVs. (Last year, GM lost $1.7 billion on its EV business; Ford lost $4.7 billion.) Although the generous subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act are designed to speed up the pivot to electric vehicles, U.S. companies—including Tesla—aren’t close to profitably producing EVs nearly as cheaply as China can today.
The most straightforward way to buy time is by imposing further trade restrictions. But doing so effectively requires careful calibration: Expose American automakers to Chinese competition too quickly and they could whither and die, but protect them for too long and they might remain complacent selling expensive gas-guzzling cars instead of transitioning toward cheaper EVs. “The sweet spot is where you prevent a rapid shift of production to China while also holding the auto industry’s feet to the fire,” Jesse Jenkins, who leads the Princeton Zero-Carbon Energy Systems Research and Optimization Lab, told me.
Separating technocratic analysis of policy objectives from the vicissitudes of politics, however, is easier said than done. Trump recently called for a 100 percent tariff on Chinese cars; Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri recently proposed legislation to raise that to 125 percent. Even congressional Democrats—many of whom are facing close elections in Rust Belt states such as Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin—have recently begun pressuring the Biden administration to raise tariffs further.
That isn’t the only way political currents could undermine the transition to electric vehicles. In order to compete with Chinese EVs, American companies must, paradoxically, learn from Chinese battery makers, who have spent decades developing the best EV batteries in the world. The U.S. auto industry knows this, which is why in February of last year Ford announced a partnership with China’s leading battery maker, CATL, to open a factory in Michigan. Ford would pay CATL to, in the words of Ford’s chairman, “help us get up to speed so that we can build these batteries ourselves” and create 2,500 new manufacturing jobs in the process. (Such partnerships are common in the EV industry; Tesla, for instance, partnered with the Japanese company Panasonic to develop its batteries.) Everybody would win: Ford, CATL, American workers, the planet.
But the backlash was swift. Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin of Virginia called the Ford-CATL partnership a “Trojan-horse relationship with the Chinese Communist Party” and vowed to keep similar projects out of his state. House Republicans launched multiple investigations into the deal, claiming that it could pose a national-security risk. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who was instrumental in passing the Inflation Reduction Act, has balked at the notion that a partnership with a Chinese company could qualify for the subsidies that that law provides.
Perhaps not coincidentally, the Biden administration eventually announced new guidelines that could disqualify the deal, and others like it, from being eligible for some of the IRA’s tax credits and grants—a move that would make it much harder for American car companies to gain the expertise they need to produce better, cheaper EVs. “It’s ironic, really,” Ilaria Mazzocco, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me. “Our efforts to cut China out from every part of the supply chain might actually be what prevents us from competing with their EVs.”
Herein lies the Biden administration’s deeper dilemma. Decarbonizing the U.S. while retaining a thriving auto industry requires a delicate balance between tariffs and subsidies, between protection and competition, between beating the Chinese and learning from them. The prevailing sentiment toward China in Washington, however, is neither delicate nor balanced. That America’s leaders are committed to preventing another China shock is commendable. But going too far in the other direction could produce a different kind of avoidable disaster.
