The standard explanation for why wages have not kept pace with productivity since the early 1970s is that it's complicated. Globalization. Technology. Skills mismatch. The changing nature of work. These factors are real and they have contributed to the outcome. But they do not fully explain the gap, and they tend to crowd out the explanation that is both simpler and more politically uncomfortable: the balance of power between employers and workers shifted, and it shifted because specific decisions made it shift.

Union membership in the United States peaked around thirty-five percent of the private-sector workforce in the mid-1950s. It is now around six percent. That collapse did not happen because workers decided they preferred to negotiate individually. It happened because a sustained and well-funded campaign to restrict union organizing, change labor law, and shift enforcement priorities made collective bargaining progressively more difficult across several decades. The campaign worked. The wages data reflects the result.

The second mechanism is the one that rarely gets named cleanly: monopsony, which is the labor market version of monopoly. When a small number of employers dominate the hiring in a region or occupation, they have pricing power over wages just as monopolists have pricing power over goods. A nurse in a rural county with two hospital systems has fewer alternatives than a nurse in a major metro. The hospital systems know this. The wages in rural areas reflect it.

The Federal Trade Commission has begun looking at employer coordination on wages, specifically agreements not to poach each other's workers and sharing of compensation data in ways that can anchor pay across an industry. This is relatively new enforcement territory, and the outcomes will matter. Where it stands is early. But for the first time in a while there’s enforcement machinery actually moving in a worker-friendly direction. Whether it produces real results before another decade of stagnant wage data piles up is what we’re going to find out.