Charleroi, a little town of about 4,000 in the heart of western Pennsylvania’s Monongahela Valley, lost not one but three major manufacturers last year. First to go was the Quality Pasta company, with 100 jobs lost. Next was the more than a century-old Corelle glass-making plant that employed 300. Finally, just in October, the Fourth Street Foods processing plant announced it would be closing and permanently laying off 250 workers.

What’s happening in Charleroi has now become such a familiar story we hardly register it as news. Amid a now 10-month slide in manufacturing employment, the United States continues to deindustrialize at pace. Fixing this would require massive investments in infrastructure and industry and ultimately a reorganization of the economic structure. But rebuilding industrial capacity is not only a question of what we produce or how much we invest—it is also a question of who has the authority to decide when productive enterprises are allowed to disappear, and why workers so rarely have a say.

In a country that has failed to secure even something as basic as single-payer healthcare, it might sound absurd to suggest that Americans would welcome a policy that expands worker control over the means of production. Yet, according to survey data from the Center for Working-Class Politics, a majority of working-class voters support major government interventions to alleviate mass layoffs, raise wages, stimulate manufacturing, and even provide public jobs. This isn’t a paradox. The populist sentiment that helped propel President Trump to power was informed in large part by discussions of industry, production, and the fate of the “American worker” in an increasingly lopsided economy where many workers are being left behind. In this environment, progressives need to offer reforms that treat citizens less as passive recipients of welfare, and more as producers who deserve a voice in the decisions that shape their lives.

Redistributive policies are, of course, necessary, and any serious egalitarian politics will require more of it. But redistribution alone has proven to be a brittle foundation for rebuilding working-class allegiance, in part because it too easily maps economic politics onto a moralized divide between those who “contribute” and those who merely “receive,” rather than onto the identities people most readily recognize in their working lives.

For most workers, the defining economic experience is not the level of after-tax inequality in the abstract, but instability and the feeling of powerlessness in the modern economy. Factories are closed, offices relocated, and plants sold off not only when they fail, but often when ownership changes or financial incentives shift. The people who depend on those firms—for income, yes, but also as a font of individual and local identity—absorb the consequences, while the decision itself remains firmly out of reach.

If Democrats want a reform that will shape our national political conversation and how the party is perceived, they could champion demands more closely tied the point of production. One concrete way to do that would be to establish a federal right of first refusal for workers to buy their workplace when it is being sold, closed, or relocated, paired with access to standard-form public financing that makes that right real.

This policy does not mandate worker ownership, abolish markets, or require ideological buy-in from the people it affects. It simply recognizes that when a firm can plausibly continue operating, the people who built it and rely on it should have a legally enforceable opportunity to keep it running.

A useful way to see why this matters is to distinguish between failure and exit.

Failure is, at least in principle, an economic judgment: a firm cannot produce what it produces on terms that make sense given costs, demand, and competition. Some failures are unavoidable, and a dynamic economy necessarily involves technological change and shifting patterns of consumption. There is no serious working-class politics built around freezing the economy in place, and there is no viable economy governed by soft budget constraints.

But exit is different. Exit is a power: the power to cash out, to sell, to relocate, to shut down, or to liquidate, and to do so confident that the underlying productive capacity could plausibly be maintained. That power is structured asymmetrically. Capital, as a whole, is more mobile than labor. Workers can move, but not cheaply, not continuously, and not without giving up the things that make stable lives possible: family networks, community ties, schools, and routines. Meanwhile, the modern workplace remains a site of concentrated authority, where the freedom to leave is often the only meaningful check workers have, and in many cases, it is a weak one.

This asymmetry is not merely theoretical. Over the past several decades, the United States has experienced a long erosion of industrial employment even as overall output has remained substantial. Structural forces such as automation and global competition help explain this shift, but they do not tell the whole story. Many closures have occurred in sectors that are still profitable and where productive capacity could plausibly have been sustained under different ownership arrangements. In these cases, exit reflects not economic failure in any straightforward sense, but decisions driven by ownership changes, financial incentives, and the relative ease with which capital can be redeployed elsewhere.

The growing role of leveraged ownership structures makes this dynamic easier to see. In some cases, businesses are acquired through transactions that load substantial debt onto operating companies. Cash flows are redirected toward servicing that debt, investment in productive capacity is constrained, and when performance falters, the company is restructured, sold off, or shut down altogether. This is not simply a moral story about short-termism. It is a consequence of institutional arrangements that grant certain actors the authority to choose exit with relative ease while insulating them from costs imposed on workers and communities.

The point is not that all such ownership structures are destructive, or that every closure is avoidable. It is that the legal and financial architecture governing exit consistently privileges absentee decision-makers, even in cases where workers and local managers may have both the knowledge and the incentive to sustain operations under different terms. When exit is cheap for some and costly for others, power is distributed accordingly.

A federal right of first refusal for employees to purchase their workplace would take this asymmetry seriously without trying to suppress economic change. The basic idea is straightforward. When a firm with more than 100 workers is being sold, closed, or relocated in a way that would eliminate a substantial share of local jobs, employees would have a legally enforceable opportunity to purchase the enterprise themselves. This guarantee would apply to a range of firms, from those that are already profitable to ones where workers can present a credible plan to restructure operations and return the business to viability.

That right would mean nothing without institutional backing, however. The proposal must include access to standard-form public financing that allows workers to quickly assemble takeover plans, secure technical assistance, and apply for funding. This financing should take the form of long-term, fixed-repayment loans priced at or near the prime rate, offered through existing federal lending channels such as the Small Business Administration. Pricing loans at a prime-rate floor is a recognition that workers face a structural disadvantage in accessing capital for buyouts, a disadvantage rooted less in economic fundamentals than in legal and financial conventions that favor conventional ownership forms. But still, making them loans ensures market discipline and hard budgets for incipient cooperatives.

None of this requires expropriation without fair compensation. The right of first refusal would be time-limited, valuation would need to be credible and transparent, and worker bids would be required to match the terms of bona fide offers or fair market valuations.

Critics will object that worker buyouts distort markets or represent something only ideological socialists would want to pursue. This misunderstands the proposal. It does not set prices in product markets, restrict entry, or prevent failure. It does not mandate worker ownership, and it does not assume that workers want to manage firms as a political project. Most workers who might exercise this right would do so for pragmatic reasons: to preserve jobs, maintain income, and stabilize their communities—while weighing the real risks involved in tying their livelihoods more closely to a single enterprise.

What’s more, much of this underlying logic is not novel. American law already structures private decisions that impose social costs. Bankruptcy law governs how firms exit markets when they fail. Environmental regulation constrains private activity when it harms third parties. Labor standards limit how employers can organize work. In each case, the premise is the same: Private decision-making can have public consequences, and democratic institutions can legitimately shape the procedures through which those decisions are made.

Politically, this reform points to something redistribution can’t quite reach. Taxing the rich and funding a bigger welfare state are necessary steps toward building a more egalitarian country, but neither speaks as directly to questions of citizenship, investment, and production as this proposal does. A stronger safety net and active labor market policies help when a plant closes; they do not help prevent the closure, or give workers a say when viable alternatives exist. Ownership and control operate on a different plane than taxes and transfers. Reforms that address them give Democrats a way to claim a producerist identity—to be a party of people who make things and keep the economy running, and not just being a coalition led by middle-class professionals, who want to help the poor and most vulnerable among us.

Supporting worker buyouts and cooperatives reframes freedom not as insulation from government, but as protection from arbitrary authority in the institutions where most adults spend much of their waking lives. It draws on a labor-republican tradition with deep roots in American political thought, one that understands economic independence and voice as preconditions for citizenship. And it does so without requiring workers to embrace a comprehensive ideological vision to pursue cooperative production.

A federal right of first refusal for workers would not solve every problem of American capitalism. But it would address a central one: the ease with which decisions of enormous consequence can be made in places like Charleroi, Pennsylvania without those most affected having any standing at all. By reshaping the rules of exit, Democrats would not only improve economic security, they would begin to rebuild a politics rooted in work and citizenship.