As with the minimum wage, there's a limit to how high unionized wages can go before employers find it cheaper to automate the jobs, cut back on staffing, or not offer the services to begin with. The key to making work pay is encouraging employers to pay higher wages to people at the bottom. This would happen if the Fed allowed the economy to grow so fast that demand for low-wage workers exceeded the supply, with the result that their wages were bid upward. Finally, we could ensure that everyone had an education sufficient to raise their productivity and thereby warrant higher pay. This is a good and noble goal, worth pursuing.
Problem is, there's no magic formula for accomplishing it.
And even if we succeed, the beneficial results are years away. Separately, none of these measures will suffice. We don't know the ideal combination of these measures, but the nation is surely rich enough and clever enough to try until we get it right. Here again, there is broad consensus, and it has existed for a long time. It should now be the basic argument for ensuring that a good system of education and job training be available to all Americans, not just the better-off.