3.1 Introduction

Paid work generates pay and work. And much more. Workers also gain intangible “goods” at work – status, sociability, skill development, and feelings of belonging, fulfillment, and accomplishment – and suffer “bads” – risks to physical and psychological health and safety, stress, harassment, conflict, and the sheer diversion of time from the rest of life – leisure, nonwork relationships and activities, or sleep. Much of what workers seek and get from a job – both the goods and the bads – hinge on their relationships with co-workers, including those above or below them in the workplace pecking order as well as their peers. And much of what paid work generates for employers – the labor that enables firms to bring goods and services to market – also depends on how well workers get along and collaborate with their co-workers. Both firms and workers derive value from good or at least functional working relationships and suffer when those relationships are fraught or dysfunctional. We can call that the social dimension of work.

The rise of remote work and “work from home,” accelerated by the COVID pandemic but apparently here to stay, has disrupted the social dimension of work and our understanding of it. Most of the discourse around that trend centers naturally on its impact on firms or workers in various sectors and layers of the labor market. Firms obviously worry about how workers’ productivity is affected by remote work. Firms’ interests in employee recruitment, morale, and retention also compel them to care about what at least some workers want out of, and outside of, work. Workers and those concerned for their welfare, for their part, focus on the impact of remote work on workers’ ability to thrive and advance at work and to achieve a decent work–life balance, and on how equitably those abilities are distributed, as well as on workers’ ability to organize and bargain collectively.

I want to focus here instead on how remote work and work-from-home might affect our social and political infrastructure outside of the workplace. My argument here builds on a proposition I develop at length elsewhere: The daily experience of more-or-less diverse co-workers working together, and the resulting connections and connectedness – especially those that cross salient lines of social division – can strengthen the foundations of a sustainable democratic society (Estlund Reference Estlund2003, Reference Estlund, Cornell and Barenberg2022). The growth of remote work and work-from-home has implications for the cultivation of that diffuse but crucial societal resource.

Importantly, the cumulative societal benefits of co-worker interactions – traditionally, face-to-face, side-by-side, day after day – are not internalized by either workers or their employers. Those are positive externalities of relationships and interactions within firms; and they are “public goods” in the sense that we all benefit from them whether or not we contribute to themFootnote ¹. Both labor market dynamics and the market for workplace technologies will reflect interests and preferences of employers and of at least some workers regarding the social dimension of work, including the impact of remote work arrangements; but they will not reflect the crucial societal spillover benefits of remote work. This chapter will develop that thesis and then reflect briefly on whether and how the conventional institutional arsenal of labor and employment law could be deployed to increase the production of those public goods.

3.2 How Working Together Can Generate “Bridging Bonds” and Strengthen DemocracyFootnote ²

Most democratic theorists agree that a sustainably democratic society requires at least a thin sense of shared identity and shared membership in the polity. That in turn rests on a substrate of social ties – not only intimate ties among close family and friends but also weaker ties among strangers or once-strangers who may serve as a social bridge to the society as a whole. Recalling Tocqueville’s famous reflections on Americans’ penchant for associations, social scientists and theorists have argued that those diffuse, cross-cutting social ties arise from associating with others and cooperating toward shared ends (Putnam Reference Putnam2000). Civil society at its best cultivates overlapping networks of purposeful cooperative activity and diffuse feelings of trust and reciprocity – forms of “social capital” that enable people to cooperate in shared undertakings and that help to hold a society and a polity together (Fung Reference Fung2003; Putnam Reference Putnam2000).

Most contemporary accounts of civil society center on voluntary associations formed around charitable, religious, political, cultural, or even recreational aims; workplace associations are seen as peripheral at best, tainted as they are by economic necessity, hierarchy, and subordination (Cohen and Arato Reference Cohen and Arato1992: ix; Ehrenberg Reference Ehrenberg1999: 235; Habermas Reference Habermas1996: 366–367; Post Reference Post1991: 289). Other accounts, including those of Tocqueville and especially Durkheim, included cooperation in the productive sphere among the associations that fostered social integration. I contend that work-based ties are of distinctive value in a diverse democratic society – in part because of their very involuntariness (Estlund Reference Estlund2003). How can that be?

To begin with, the need to make a living leads most adults to spend much of their lives at work and interacting with co-workers – much more time than they spend in “voluntary associations.”Footnote ³ That social interaction happens in the course of the work itself, before and after work, during breaks, around the proverbial (and increasingly metaphorical) water cooler, and in the digital sphere. And it includes a lot of talking. Co-workers talk about the work itself, about shared working conditions – a speed-up of production, a rumor of layoffs, a disagreeable supervisor – and about family, politics, popular culture, sports, and other stuff of daily life. Over weeks, months, or even years of working together, co-workers often develop ties of affection, empathy, loyalty, solidarity, and friendship. Obviously, workplace ties can also be infected by conflict, resentment, abuse, or humiliation. But given all that is at stake in a job, people often find ways to work through or around conflicts and to get along well enough to get the job done. The involuntariness of bonds among co-workers may give them a resilience that is hard to replicate in voluntary associations.

The history of organized labor offers especially powerful evidence of the strong bonds that can form through common work (Estlund Reference Estlund, Cornell and Barenberg2022). Shared workplace grievances have long provided a rich medium for the growth of solidarity, a willingness to take risks and make sacrifices for the group, and a platform for organizing and collective action. But it is not only shared grievances that can unite co-workers. Working together creates a base of common experiences and interests, and can generate social ties grounded in shared pride and purpose, shared frustration, or both.

The relative resilience and density of workplace ties is especially important because those ties connect people who neither grew up together nor chose each other as associates. Co-workers are comparatively likely to come from different cultural, religious, racial, and ethnic backgrounds – compared, that is, to families, neighborhoods, religious congregations, or most voluntary associations (Estlund Reference Estlund2003: 7–10, 61–69. See also Briggs Reference Briggs2007; Darling-Hammond et al. Reference Darling-Hammond, Lee and Mendoza-Denton2019; Tomaskovic-Deney et al. Reference Tomaskovic-Deney2006). And given the relative intensity and duration of workplace relationships, ties among co-workers of different racial and ethnic identities often have a chance to deepen and even grow into friendships (Estlund Reference Estlund2003: 9–12; see also 33–35). But from a societal standpoint, those strong ties of interracial friendship are less important in themselves than is the larger reservoir of weaker positive interracial ties among co-workers, out of which friendships can sometimes grow.

The point is not that intergroup relations at work are wholly positive. Clearly out-group biases and in-group affinities persist, and harm groups that are still underrepresented in good jobs and especially in management (Estlund Reference Estlund2003: 77–83). At the same time, piles of social scientific evidence accumulated over many decades back up the so-called “contact hypothesis” first advanced in the 1950s (Allport Reference Allport1954) – that is, the proposition that ongoing contact and cooperation among individuals from diverse groups can counter stereotypes and biases and contribute to more positive and egalitarian intergroup relations and attitudes (Estlund Reference Estlund2003: 74–76; see also Darling-Hammond et al. Reference Darling-Hammond, Lee and Mendoza-Denton2019; Tropp and Pettigrew Reference Tropp and Pettigrew2006; Paluck et al. Reference Paluck, Green and Green2019)Footnote ⁴. Personal connections across group lines – what Putnam calls “bridging ties” (Putnam Reference Putnam2000) – not only can counter stereotypes and biases; they also can provide a medium for the exchange of experiences and opinions and the cultivation of empathy and broad-mindedness that may shape political preferences, enable compromise, and enrich public discourse.

The workplace is a uniquely prolific source of those bridging ties because it fosters interpersonal cooperation, informal sociability, solidarity, and shared experiences and interests across often-divisive group lines. The daily experience of working together across differences, multiplied over legions of working adults, thus strengthens the social foundations for democratic governance in a heterogeneous society, albeit in diffuse and incalculable ways.

Before turning to the impact of remote work, more must be said about the compulsory nature of workplace ties – both the economic hold of the workplace on individuals and the power managers exercise there. The economic compulsion to sell one’s labor and the managerial compulsion to cooperate in production are at the heart of enduring critiques of capitalismFootnote ⁵. Those elements of compulsion, on some accounts, disqualify workplace associations from the vaunted domain of civil society. But the semi-compulsory nature of workplace associations also gives workers powerful motives to overcome conflict and friction, and to carry on cooperating with co-workers with whom they might not have chosen to associate, rather than simply walking away. Workers answer to managers who have powerful means and motives to induce workers to overcome their differences and cooperate productively. Those managerial imperatives have generated a cottage industry of corporate diversity initiatives and consultants, with mixed results for intergroup relationsFootnote ⁶. But as long as employers have a modicum of diversity within their workforces – a state of affairs that the legal prohibition of employment discrimination helps to ensure – they have solid bottom-line incentives to figure out how to promote intergroup cooperation at work. A crucial byproduct of that cooperation is the profusion of “bridging ties” across group lines, with their spillover benefits for society.

State regulatory compulsion also plays a role in workplace associations. As noted, managers manage and workers work under the shadow of antidiscrimination laws, which make workforces more diverse than they might otherwise be. Those laws also help to counter the interpersonal conflict or harassment that might otherwise follow from workforce diversity by making employers accountable for harassment and discrimination, direct and indirect. Those legal pressures reinforce managers’ operational reasons for promoting at least a modicum of civility among co-workersFootnote ⁷. In turn, relatively civil and cooperative relations among diverse co-workers help to enrich the roots of public discourse and social solidarity in individuals’ daily lives.

Again, I do not mean to overstate either the demographic diversity of existing workplaces or the law’s efficacy in combatting discrimination, stratification, and intergroup conflict at work. Workplaces are not nearly as diverse or integrated as they could or should be after all these years. But we should ask: compared to what? Compared to the voluntary associations at the core of conventional conceptions of civil society? Unfortunately, many people choose – when their choices are unconstrained – to live and associate with others from similar backgrounds and racial and ethnic identities. But diverse societies must find ways and places to cultivate connectedness, empathy, and reciprocity across group lines. And that may require the convergence of legal, economic, and organizational constraints that can be found in the workplace but rarely elsewhere.

3.3 The Impact of Remote Work on the Societal Reservoir of Bridging Ties

That brings us to the question of how the rise of remote work might affect workplaces’ capacity and tendency to cultivate this societal resource of intergroup connectedness, empathy, and reciprocity. It is too soon, if not simply impossible, to measure this particular effect of remote work empirically. But anyone who is persuaded of the societal value of working together should be seriously concerned about the sheer reduction in face-to-face contact, side-by-side cooperation, and interstitial sociability entailed by the rise of remote work.

We should start by recognizing that the production of civically virtuous workplace ties is and has always been entirely incidental to the pursuit of positive social ties by workers and firms for their own reasons. Social ties form at work mainly because, since the Industrial Revolution and the advent of capitalism, the production of marketable goods and services has required firms to convene workers in common spaces – in factories, loading docks, offices, hospitals, retail outlets, and so on – and to coordinate their work and induce their cooperation with each other and with supervisors. (To be sure, as workers began to organize themselves against capital, they and their leaders had other reasons to convene and form bonds – reasons grounded in solidarity and collective power. We’ll return to that distinctive dimension of workplace connectedness below.)

Most social ties within the workplace arise because those ties benefit firms, workers, or both in tangible or intangible ways. Firms depend to varying degrees on cooperation, teamwork, and camaraderie among workers (and they lose out from most forms of conflict, which may undercut morale or generate turnover)Footnote ⁸. Stated differently, firms have an interest in cultivating “intrafirm social capital,” or useful social ties, for the sake of productivity, retention, and recruitment (Ben Hador Reference Ben Hador2016: 1121–1122; Sözbilir Reference Sözbilir2018: 94; Westlund and Adam Reference Westlund and Adam2010: 904). Workers for their part are social beings; once convened and compelled to cooperate, they will often form friendly ties, friendships, and some sense of community with co-workers, even apart from the cooperation their bosses demand from them. Some might also engage in or suffer from degrading treatment, exclusion, and bullying; things clearly can go badly among co-workers. But both workers and firms have powerful reasons to cultivate friendly or at least functional ties that enable them to get things done together.

I have argued that those ties also have value to the whole society through their contribution to the social and political cohesion that diverse and pluralist democracies require. But those societal benefits have never motivated the production of those social ties. The societal value of working together is a positive societal externality of the organization of work within firms, and a public good, that we have largely failed to appreciate and that might be very hard to cultivate deliberately and directly. So we should attend to what motivates firms and workers to produce this incidental public good, and what forces might push in the other direction, including the rise of technologies of remote work.

Let’s first look at this landscape from the standpoint of firms and managers. Whenever interpersonal cooperation or “teamwork” is required to produce what they bring to market, firms will try to organize and manage work so as to cultivate productive worker relationships and reduce counterproductive conflict (Brown et al. Reference Brown, Hill and Lorinkova2021: 681). Social relationships at work can motivate workers (Borghouts et al. Reference Borghouts2022: 10–12), increase job satisfaction (Charalampous et al. Reference Charalampous2019: 56), and ease emotional demands that affect work performance (Parker et al. Reference Parker, Waldstrøm and Shah2022: 1623–1624). Cultivating those relationships might require face-to-face, in-person interaction, both planned and unplanned. Or it might not – depending partly on the evolving state of the art of virtual and remote work technologies.

Managers, along with the consultants and researchers who advise them, have to assess the effectiveness of remote technologies versus in-person interaction in promoting cooperation and productivity (Meluso et al. Reference Meluso, Johnson and Bagrow2022: 16–17). And managers in turn will demand from the tech sector innovations in remote co-working technologies that improve the productivity of remote work (Bloom et al. Reference Bloom, Davis and Zhestkova2021: 4–5; Zhu et al. Reference Zhu2021: 4–5). Managers will have to figure out, as those innovations are developed and brought to market in response to firms’ demands, how to best use technology and how much face-time – with co-workers and with supervisors, managers, and team leaders – is still needed for workers to carry out their jobs well, to trust each other, and to resolve conflicts. Considerations like these appear to be motivating a push to get workers back on site for at least a few days per week or even full-time (Microsoft WTI 2022). They might continue to lead managers going forward to require some of in-person working-togetherness that incidentally generates virtuous social spillover.

Then again, some managers might find that virtual meetings and remote team production work well enough – especially as technology improves and workers and managers get used to it – to get what their firms need out of workers. Some might find that remote work reduces the risk of harassment or other forms of potentially disruptive conflict among workers (Alves et al. Reference Alves2022: 854). Part of the unique societal value of workplace interaction comes from individuals’ feeling compelled to work through or around conflict, especially across lines of social division; but managers would probably prefer simply to minimize those conflicts, and remote work might seem to allow them to do that. Some managers (like my brother-in-law) might find that moving their entire business online through remote technologies improves the bottom line if only by avoiding the significant real estate expenses entailed by traditional office work (Barrero et al. Reference Barrero, Bloom and Davis2023: 13). Those cost savings might more than offset the incremental productivity losses, if any, of remote versus in-person synchronous production (JLL 2016). Different firms and managers will settle on different mixtures of in-person and remote work that gets the job done. But let us be clear: Whatever mix of remote, in-person, and hybrid work is good enough and productive enough for firms might not be good enough to forge the resilient workplace ties – especially those across group lines – that society needs.

To some degree, the decisions of firms and managers will have to take into account how workers view the respective virtues of in-person and remote work. Some workers have institutional channels within firms for pressing their own interests; we will return to those below. But labor markets also afford channels for workers, including those without collective representation, to assert their interests. In particular, workers who are “in demand” – who have skills that employers need and cannot easily replace – are in a position to make some demands of their own or to be choosy. In tight labor markets – as in the United States in recent years – even some less-skilled workers might be sufficiently “in demand” to make some implicit demands on employers or to shop around for preferred working conditions as well as higher wages. To be sure, these dynamics affect only jobs that can feasibly be done remotely; that proviso disproportionately knocks out many low-wage workersFootnote ⁹. But in a large swath of the labor market, it matters what in-demand workers demand in terms of in-person versus remote or hybrid co-working arrangements (for jobs in which the latter are feasible). Let’s examine their perspectives on remote work.

Some in-demand workers might prefer a more sociable work environment, with supportive supervisors and co-workers and positive social dynamics. In one survey, 61% of employee respondents identified less socializing as a top concern of working even partly remote (Glint 2021). So, too, some ambitious workers believe that more face-time with bosses will help them to advance within the organization (Glint 2021). (And there is some evidence to support that belief; Bloom et al. Reference Bloom2015: 170.) So far, however, studies suggest that many workers – especially but not only women with children – place a higher priority on better work–life balanceFootnote ¹⁰. Those workers are gravitating to employers and jobs that offer flexibility in work time and location and less or no commuting timeFootnote ¹¹. Some workers might even prefer to avoid face-time with co-workers who are annoying, or biased, or simply different from themselves; those co-workers were not, after all, the people with whom they’d have chosen to spend thirty, forty, or more hours per week. Involuntary association is not an unmitigated benefit to workers even if it serves societal interests.

For various reasons, many workers are now seeking out remote work and work-from-home options, partly because of its greater flexibility and compatibility with family demands and home life. Some workers – perhaps especially women – appear willing to give up, in exchange for that flexibility, some compensation or whatever edge more in-person face-time might give them in climbing the organizational ladder (with unsettling implications for gender equality that are beyond the scope of this chapter)Footnote ¹². Managers seeking to recruit or retain those in-demand workers might feel obliged to supply a good deal of what those workers want, and to offer more remote work opportunities than managers might otherwise preferFootnote ¹³. Employers have to balance workers’ demands – or those of in-demand workers! – against their own need to maintain productivity and whatever level of worker interaction and cooperation that requires.

Employers catering to workers who want more flexibility and less mandatory face time, as well as those seeking to reduce real estate costs, are driving up business demand for digital tools that make remote work more seamless and productive (Bloom et al. Reference Bloom, Davis and Zhestkova2021: 4–5). Some employers in some sectors are striving to make remote workplace interactions, including those between remote and in-office workers in hybrid settings, more like face-to-face interactions, and more socially rich and inclusiveFootnote ¹⁴. Some employers, and therefore some developers and vendors of workplace technologies, attempt to replicate the informal, unplanned “water cooler” interactions that characterize in-person workplacesFootnote ¹⁵. That’s a good thing from the societal working-together perspective; more “life-like” forms of remote engagement should incidentally generate more of the societally valuable connections and feelings of connectedness. On the other hand, the more employers can get what they want out of workplace interactions through remote technologies, the more they might be inclined to substitute remote for in-person work.

In short, some employers and some workers, for their own reasons, value the social dimension of work, including the informal, incidental worker-driven interactions that have traditionally occurred at work, and that generate spillover value to society. But both workers and employers are pulled in both directions – toward and away from remote work; and in the meantime, both innovations in remote work technologies and workers’ and bosses’ growing familiarity and comfort with them are enabling a shift toward more remote work in much of the economy. It would be surprising if the various arrangements that firms and workers arrive at in different sectors and organizations – even if they continue to include some in-person work – end up generating as much of the workplace connectedness and especially the bridging ties that society has derived in the past from workplace interaction, and that it needs now more than ever.

3.4 The Confounding Role of Worker Solidarity, Self-Organization, and Unions

A confounding factor is worker solidarity. It is confounding in part because this is a form of workplace connectedness that employers generally do not value and often seek to avoid. That is especially true in industrial relations systems like that in the US, in which unionization is an all-or-nothing proposition that plays out at the enterprise and facility level based on majority rule, and in which employers have powerful means and motives to resist unionization.

In the United States, unionization requires an intensive campaign by unions and pro-union workers for majority support; and the campaign is largely conducted under the noses of hostile employers who invest heavily in both crude and sophisticated forms of “union avoidance.” Brishen Rogers, in his recent book Data and Democracy at Work, shows how US employers deploy workplace technologies – especially surveillance and monitoring technologies – not, or not only, to enhance productivity but to frustrate workers’ ability to organize themselves and exercise countervailing power (Rogers Reference Rogers2023). Employers may do that in part by organizing production so as to minimize workers’ occasions to congregate in person (without surveillance), and to minimize their opportunities to share grievances informally, and to develop the kind of mutual trust that is usually a prerequisite for union organizing. Unionization is not impossible but is much more challenging where workers do not have extensive daily contact at work – where they do not work together physically.

US employers are most anxious to squelch the solidarity that might lead to unionization among workers who need it most – those with little or no individual bargaining power and little ability to make demands on or shop around among employers. In many of those jobs, whether in the dwindling non-unionized manufacturing sector or in the large and growing service sector, workers’ physical presence is a necessity and remote work is not feasible. But where remote work is feasible and unionization is perceived as a “risk” to be managed and minimized, employers have an additional powerful incentive to shift away from in-person, face-to-face workplace interaction and to frustrate informal social interaction among workers by design. And even if employers conclude that they need to cultivate informal interactions among remote workers to elicit their cooperation and collective creativity, employers may be able to impede oppositional solidarity-building, for example, by monitoring workers’ interactions.

Other confounding aspects of this dimension of workplace connectedness – solidarity and self-organization among workers in latent or overt opposition to employers – lie in the role of workers’ organizations. Workers’ organizations plainly benefit from the social dimension of work; they might therefore have reasons, and potentially some power, to push back against the rise of remote work. Or they might not.

Workers collectively benefit from solidarity that strengthens their collective institutions and their collective bargaining power. That solidaristic connectedness is a public good among workers – a public good, again, in the sense that all may gain from that solidaristic connectedness whether or not they contribute to it. The production of public goods suffers from an inherent collective action problem: Because individuals cannot capture for themselves the gains from building solidaristic ties, they may be unwilling or at least undermotivated to shoulder the risks and burdens of producing those ties. But unions can help to overcome this collective action problem by serving as collective and institutional vehicles for promoting solidaristic ties and self-organizational activities among workers for the good of all.

Solidaristic connectedness and self-organization among workers can also benefit the society at large, as argued above, by bridging intergroup differences among workers and promoting cross-racial connectedness that builds on workplace ties. As I have written elsewhere: “Unions at their best can promote intergroup connectedness at the workplace and within unions, and can make mutually reinforcing moral and material arguments for intergroup solidarity. That can make [unions] especially credible proponents of racial inclusion and progressive class-based policies and politics beyond the workplace” (Estlund Reference Estlund, Cornell and Barenberg2022). Effective unions with diverse worker constituencies have to find ways to counter the kind of racially divisive appeals that are corroding democracies across the developed world. That is just one of many ways in which a strong labor movement can fortify democratic norms and institutions (Roberts Reference Roberts, Cornell and Barenberg2022).

Unfortunately, the rise of remote work potentially weakens organized labor at its roots in daily interaction among workers under shared working conditions. Remote and at-home work seems like an especially poor medium for the kind of intense organizing that is required in the United States, given its decentralized enterprise-based system of union organizing and bargaining. Remote work thus seems likely to exacerbate the long-term trend of union decline, most dramatic in the United States, and to pose one of many challenges to unions’ revival.

These might be reasons why unions might deploy some of whatever power they do have to push back against remote work, at least in some settings and some forms. To do that, however, they would presumably have to convince their worker-constituents to resist remote work rather than welcoming it. Stated differently, empowering workers to pursue their own interests and make demands on employers through unionization is unlikely to put the brakes on the rise of remote work unless that is what workers want. Workers might prefer to use their collective bargaining power to expand their ability to work from home; the benefits in work–life balance are bound to weigh more heavily in workers’ own calculus than the societal value of informal, spontaneous, non-instrumental co-worker interactions, and their diffuse benefits to worker solidarity, collective power, and social integration. So there are lots of good reasons for society to improve the legal infrastructure for union organizing and a stronger collective voice for workers. But those reforms might not do much to fend off whatever threat remote work poses to the future societal reservoir of connections and connectedness that flows from working together.

The same dilemma puts in question the usefulness of other traditional labor law mechanisms in responding to the rise of remote work. We could probably devise regulatory interventions that would put a societal thumb on the scale in favor of in-person shared work (though that’s not an easy task, and limitations of space and imagination prevent my undertaking it here!). The societal value of working together – if my argument above is persuasive – might help to justify those interventions despite the preferences of individual workers and their families for more remote work and a better work–life balance. But even if it were normatively justified for society to weigh in on the side of in-person working together, where is the political constituency for regulatory interventions of this sort if they are not aligned with workers’ preferences?

3.5 Conclusion

Part of the value of working together is captured by employers, and part of it is captured by workers. But both workers and employers have interests and aims that, all things considered, might point them toward greater substitution of remote work for in-person co-working. In the meantime, technology is increasingly enabling both workers and especially employers to get what they need out of the social dimension of work without in-person interaction. That is a problem – again, if my argument above is persuasive. The societal spillover benefits of working together are not captured by either employers or individual workers; they are “externalities” that are likely to be undersupplied if left to the parties to pursue their own interests through market mechanisms. That means that the demands and interests of workers and employers – even if successfully channeled into collective bargaining – may lead them to converge on various mixtures of in-person and remote work that fail to serve society’s interests in the spillover benefits of working together, and especially of working together across lines of social division.

There are still plenty of good reasons to pursue institutional reforms that empower workers collectively and strengthen their collective institutions. But those face strong headwinds, and will have to be reimagined, in a remote-work environment. For example, legal interventions might be designed to facilitate workers’ remote engagement with each other and with workers’ organizations free from employer surveillance. (Clearly more needs to be thought and said about this, but not here.) If a mix of traditional and innovative labor law reforms can help workers to build stronger collective institutions, those reforms and those stronger institutions could help to cultivate workers’ solidaristic ties, and perhaps offset the thinning out of workplace ties themselves.

A profound challenge to that traditional labor law project – reimagined or not – lies in the mutual dependency of working together and solidarity: Growing and strengthening workers’ organizations will help to fortify workers’ feelings and experiences of solidarity; yet that project also depends on those feelings and experiences, which might be impoverished in a world of remote work. Still, if worker organizations can gain greater power to shape working conditions and workplace technologies, then their institutional interest in cultivating solidarity may lead them to find new ways of fostering bonds among workers even with the rise of remote and hybrid work. Or so we must hope for the sake of democracy’s future.