It's mid-afternoon in late June two decades from now, and the weather in New York City is gross: hot, humid, slimy. You're trying to find your way to a job interview when you pass a child yanking on her father's arm, confused by a throng of people marching in a circle in front of them. They seem angry—there's a lot of yelling and chanting and jockeying going on—but the most confusing part, at least to the toddler's eye, is a giant inflatable rat.

About seven decades later, unions are in decline and workers are in as much trouble as they have been since the 1920s. Inequality is out of control, right-wing populism is on the rise, and, thanks to a bombshell Supreme Court ruling Wednesday , organized labor is about to shrink. Union members and advocates hope the latest frontal assault from the right could help rally its membership to put up a renewed fight, but that fight is going to be a brutal one.

Many Americans today would recognize what was going on back there as a picket line. Labor unions and impassioned workers interested in forming them—or winning concessions from management without an official union—have picketed workplaces across the United States for well over a century. Along the way, as documented in countless films, books, songs, classic Simpsons episodes**,** and even memes , they won incredible victories: the 40-hour workweek, healthcare benefits, an end to child labor, and much more. Union density—the percentage of American workers who belong to one— peaked at over a third of the total labor force in the mid-1950s, thanks in part to a sort of pact between business and organized labor after World War II. Unions were institutions stitched into the fabric of mainstream America just like churches or Rotary clubs.

You know what it is, of course. Maybe your mother was a labor organizer way back when. Maybe your cousin helped unionize an online postcard startup that went bankrupt before any employees could see the benefits of a contract. But the child's father, perhaps 35 years old and gainfully employed at an Amazon subsidiary, doesn't know or doesn't care. He shrugs and pulls the kid down a side street to avoid the hubbub.

"Paychecks would very much continue to erode because labor standards would be under attack," Jared Bernstein, a former economic advisor to Vice President Joe Biden now at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank, told me.

McNicholas was referring to the era before the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which enshrined collective bargaining in American law at the height of the Great Depression. The preceding era was not a pleasant one. Strikes were brutally and bloodily put down by private security forces contracted by nervous—or just plain vindictive—bosses. Labor actions could resemble actual combat, like West Virginia's " Mine Wars ." Workers were literally locked inside factories, sometimes resulting in their deaths. And pay was often so low as to make them wonder how they might endure next day, much less the next week or year.

"We don't have to sort of wonder and fictionalize it," Celine McNicholas, director of labor law and policy at EPI, told me. "History gives us an indication—before we had meaningful labor representation and unions—of what our economy looked like."

More than anything else, what emerged from conversations with economists, labor experts, sociologists and futurists is that a society without unions would look a lot like the increasingly gilded-age reality we live in now—just worse. And it's not nearly as implausible as you might think.

Obviously, if unions were erased from America, the income of unionized workers would fall. But according to research from left-leaning think tank Economic Policy Institute (EPI), declines in unionization are linked to a drop in the pay of nonunion workers , too. And the implications of organized labor's total collapse go way beyond paychecks. Without unions, racism and tribalism might get worse, cities could look physically different, rent would likely be even harder to keep up with, and weekends might become a thing of the past.

Despite the downward trend, the worst-case scenario is rarely contemplated: What would happen if unions actually disappeared entirely? It might seem like a crazy proposition, since polling data shows young people are high on organized labor . On the other hand, breaking unions is pretty clearly an end desired by the right-wing billionaires dictating who gets to serve as judges in the courts and hold elected office.

"The solidarities that feel real to people tend to be tribal," said Todd Gitlin, a social-movement historian at Columbia University. "There's a lot of evidence that unions are the best anti-racist institutions we have." One study by historian Timothy Minchin found that membership in the AFL-CIO* made white voters who might otherwise have been reluctant to embrace the first black major-party presidential nominee more willing to give the new guy a shot.

Unions' dissipation wouldn't just affect the lot of people at the workplace or their economic life—it might change the face of American culture. Among other things, experts said, it could unleash even more ethnic tension and foment the kind of nativism preyed on by demagogues like Donald Trump. Suffice it to say it's probably not a coincidence that the reemergence of straight-up white nationalism in mainstream American politics came after decades of union decline.

Right-wing interest groups like ALEC and Republican politicians like Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker have long framed their dismantling of collective bargaining as a matter of fairness or budget issues. Why should union workers have it better than everyone else, especially if—as in the case of public-sector workers—their generous contracts come at the expense of taxpayers? But these seemingly practical concerns mask a deeper agenda: transferring wealth from workers to their bosses and the investor class. Unions effectively siphon money from management and government and give it to workers; if you could keep more of the money produced by your business—or the government you consider an extension of it—wouldn't you? It's no surprise that the relentlessly pro-business Republican Party has been on an anti-union crusade for decades . And if unions did not exist—and labor protections were further weakened as a result—the slope could get slippery, fast.

To wit: Unions don't just negotiate pay-rates or basic benefits like healthcare for workers. They also hold bosses accountable for shady shit going on at the workplace. "Unions are a political force, particularly public-sector unions, which is exactly why the right has been tilted against them for so long," Bernstein explained.

There's a potential 2038 where you might find yourself trying to cope with postmodern versions of those same pre-NLRA forces**.** Maybe your gig at on online retailer's "fulfillment center" that paid you five dollars an hour would require dealing with 80-plus degree temperatures in a windowless warehouse with no one around in the event a machine impaled a worker against a wall. Why would the bosses bother with basic safety protections if the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) had been trimmed down to a shadow of its former self by a corporate-dominated Congress?

By their very nature unions bring people together to talk about their shared problems. Workers of the future may be in dire need of that—remote work is on the rise, and a lot of app-enabled occupations are solo endeavors where you're basically taking orders from your phone. In the post-union future, there's no reason for you and your fellow "independent contractors" to actually gather in the same physical—or even online—space to chat. In fact, your boss won't allow that kind of scheming. Without your workplace exposing you to people from diverse backgrounds, your knowledge of other ethnic, gender, and cultural identities will largely be confined to what you see when streaming internet content from one of the two providers that will enjoy a joint monopoly over such services.

"The retreat into more tribal identities fills the gap when you have no set of durable organizations to bridge those divides," explained Washington University in St. Louis sociologist Jake Rosenfeld. Specifically**,** white men have sometimes been brought into the fold of modern social tolerance in part by affiliations with labor. "Even today, with unions at their weakest state, unions are the only organization that brings that otherwise very conservative on all dimensions part of the body politic"—white men—"in a more progressive direction, and tempers those other passions."

Of course, it hasn't always been true that pro-union elements were forces for social tolerance. The William Jennings Bryan-led populist revolts of the 1890s and early 1900s often leaned in to white supremacy. But in the last century, as the progressive era gave way to the Civil Rights movement, unions have often been a partner in fighting for people of color, women, the LGBTQ community, and other groups seeking equal protection under the law. An end to unions means those voices will be more difficult to hear.

DAILY MISERY WITH NO WEEKEND IN SIGHT

Of course, a union-less future might not exactly be devoid of workers' groups vaguely devoted to something resembling solidarity. But such organizations might be like the weak Independent Drivers Guild that formed in 2016 to represent Uber workers in New York. That group gave drivers a voice on issues at their workplace, helping them advocate for minimum-pay rules and even win changes to tipping policies, but denied them the power to collectively bargain contracts with Uber. That means it can't secure full-time employee status for its members, much less demand better, more structural pay or health or other benefits. And it should be noted it only seemed to come into existence at all because an actual union—the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers—helped organize for it.