Through looking at state adoption of right-to-work laws, state embrace of social equity between employees of different racial and ethnic groups, and federal adjudication and administration of the National Labor Relations Act, we seek to better understand how state and federal intervention in labor-management relations have contributed to income inequality across regions and overtime in the United States. As we will see, both state and federal support of employers’ prerogatives and of racially biased institutions are associated with weaker worker power. For example, change in adjudication and administration of the National Labor Relations Board to the benefit of the employer starting in the 1980s is associated with around a 90 percent decrease in strike activity across states. And state embrace of Jim Crow in the midcentury and the New Jim Crow since the 1980s explains a significant portion of the variation in worker power, and thus wages between states.