On a spring morning last year, two men from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum met at a Manhattan diner for brunch and, somewhat to their own surprise, discovered they agreed on a way to address that problem. One was Eli Lehrer, who co-founded and runs the R Street Institute, a free-market-oriented, Republican-leaning think tank in Washington. Lehrer believes the time has come for the American right to reconsider its decades-long war on unions. Their collapse, he says, has fueled the growth of government and of the welfare state, which has stepped in to regulate workplaces and provide job security as unions have died out.

His unlikely dining companion was Andy Stern. As the president of the Service Employees International Union from 1996 to 2010, Stern had become the labor-movement equivalent of a rock star by more than doubling the union’s membership. Unions, he thinks, cannot survive unless they innovate and change, but laws intended to protect and preserve them get in the way. “Anytime anybody gets creative, these laws stop us,” he said when I spoke with him and Lehrer recently.