Fifty young people affiliated with the Sunrise Movement were arrested on November 13 in House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s office, following a sit-in demanding that Democrats use their new majority in the U.S. House of Representatives to launch a comprehensive plan to confront climate change — a Green New Deal.

Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez not only attended the protest, but the same day posted on her website draft language to establish a Select Committee on a Green New Deal.

Ocasio-Cortez’s willingness to embrace the dynamic and confrontational mobilization of the Sunrise Movement and their reinvigoration of a public discourse on a Green New Deal signals that the next legislative session will present opportunities to create and elevate an ambitious left agenda.

Ocasio-Cortez’s draft proposal for a Green New Deal Committee contains bold provisions for achieving 100 percent renewable energy, a federal jobs guarantee, a commitment to mitigate racial, regional, and gender-based wealth and income inequalities, and a plan to use innovative public financing to achieve these goals. While these are all important aspects of a Green New Deal, what’s missing are any terms for protecting — let alone strengthening — the right to organize.

One of the key provisions of the original New Deal was the 1935 Wagner Act, which still forms the basis of U.S. labor law today. The intent of the act was to encourage unionization so that workers would have a legal structure and protections in labor disputes with their employers. Congress passed the Wagner Act on the heels of the 1934 strike wave, when thousands upon thousands of workers resolved such disputes through disruptive action.

The Wagner Act recognized that workers and employers did not have the same interests and situated the federal government as a neutral arbiter in the labor disputes that had long been a feature of American capitalism. By regulating this conflict, the Wagner Act paved the way for massive waves of unionization, the legitimacy of collective bargaining, and a broadly shared prosperity by the middle of the 20th century.