With more than 1.5 million employees globally, Amazon is among the largest and most influential employers in the United States. Until recently, it was also considered unorganizable, in large part due to the firm’s willingness to oppose unionization at all costs. That perception changed recently when the Amazon Labor Union, led by Christian Smalls, succeeded in winning a union election campaign at an Amazon warehouse on Long Island. Attention now turns to the ALU’s efforts to secure a contract and to organize more Amazon workers.

As the latest success of the Fight for $15 campaign, California’s new FAST Act creates a sectoral council to establish wages and certain working conditions in the fast food industry. Seen by many as a step in the direction of sectoral bargaining, the law is among the most important developments in contemporary labor and employment policy.

Union organizing and bargaining in the United States have traditionally been conducted at the level of the individual workplace. Although such “enterprise bargaining” has resulted in meaningful gains for tens of millions of workers, it has also left many workers without union representation — particularly in the decentralized and fissured workplaces prominent in the contemporary labor market — and contributed to anti-union sentiment among management that perceives unionization to imply competitive disadvantage. These dynamics have fueled increasing interest in sectoral bargaining, a system in which organizing and representation is done at the level of the industry rather than the workplace and which is far more successful at taking wages and working conditions out of competition.

A bellwether company in the U.S., Starbucks — despite its “progressive” reputation — has enacted vicious anti-union policies. And yet, workers at hundreds of Starbucks stores across the country have succeeded in organizing and winning union representation. Predictably, Starbucks is dragging out the bargaining process, violating workers’ labor rights, and continuing to interfere with employees’ choice to join a union.

With a Democratic majority on the Board and an admirably ambitious General Counsel, the Biden NLRB promises to be among the most consequential in history.