Today, the labor movement’s decline is widely considered an irreversible reality—the inevitable outcome of globalization and automation, and the norm for a postindustrial economy, hardly worthy of comment. When discussions turn to the glaring and still growing imbalance of power between working-class and elite interests in our political system, Republicans celebrate the free market and certainly don’t invoke a return of unions. But neither do most Democrats. Why this is so, why it’s a problem, and what if anything might be done to revive the politics of work—these issues are the subject of two very different books: the historian Steve Fraser’s The Age of Acquiescence and Only One Thing Can Save Us, by Thomas Geoghegan, a longtime labor attorney.