How Antitrust Failed Workers

How Antitrust Failed Workers PDF Author: Eric A. Posner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019750762X
Category : LAW
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Antitrust law has very rarely been used by workers to challenge anticompetitive employment practices. Yet recent empirical research shows that labor markets are highly concentrated, and that employers engage in practices that harm competition and suppress wages. These practices include no-poaching agreements, wage-fixing, mergers, covenants not to compete, and misclassification of gig workers as independent contractors. This failure of antitrust to challenge labor-market misbehavior is due to a range of other failures-intellectual, political, moral, and economic. And the impact of this failure has been profound for wage levels, economic growth, and inequality. In light of the recent empirical work, it is urgent for regulators, courts, lawyers, and Congress to redirect antitrust resources to labor market problems. This book offers a strategy for judicial and legislative reform"--

How Antitrust Failed Workers

How Antitrust Failed Workers PDF Author: Eric A. Posner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019750762X
Category : LAW
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Antitrust law has very rarely been used by workers to challenge anticompetitive employment practices. Yet recent empirical research shows that labor markets are highly concentrated, and that employers engage in practices that harm competition and suppress wages. These practices include no-poaching agreements, wage-fixing, mergers, covenants not to compete, and misclassification of gig workers as independent contractors. This failure of antitrust to challenge labor-market misbehavior is due to a range of other failures-intellectual, political, moral, and economic. And the impact of this failure has been profound for wage levels, economic growth, and inequality. In light of the recent empirical work, it is urgent for regulators, courts, lawyers, and Congress to redirect antitrust resources to labor market problems. This book offers a strategy for judicial and legislative reform"--

Antitrust for Consumers and Workers

Antitrust for Consumers and Workers PDF Author: Lauren Sillman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 41

Get Book Here

Book Description
This paper discusses the problem of buyer power in labor markets and proposes a framework for more interventionist enforcement under existing merger law. While a common core of basic economic assumptions supports increased enforcement as a general matter, the choice among several available economic welfare standards has significant implications for merger enforcement outcomes in certain types of cases. This paper considers economic standards based on total welfare, on customer welfare, and on trading partner welfare and concludes that a trading partner welfare standard should be adopted. However, in cases where a merger is likely to result in significant efficiencies that will decrease prices for customers, customer impacts should be considered when crafting a remedy, and if the efficiencies produced by a merger are inextricably linked to and substantially exceed the harms from increased labor market power, agencies should exercise their prosecutorial discretion to allow the merger to go ahead. On the basis of these principles, the paper then develops a framework for analysis that builds off of the existing processes and techniques described in the 2010 Horizontal Merger Guidelines. This framework is designed to be a practical, principled approach that benefits both customers and workers.

The Antitrust Paradox

The Antitrust Paradox PDF Author: Robert Bork
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781736089712
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 536

Get Book Here

Book Description
The most important book on antitrust ever written. It shows how antitrust suits adversely affect the consumer by encouraging a costly form of protection for inefficient and uncompetitive small businesses.

How Antitrust Failed Workers

How Antitrust Failed Workers PDF Author: Eric A. Posner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197507646
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Get Book Here

Book Description
A trenchant account of an unacknowledged driver of inequality and wage stagnation in America: the failure of antitrust law to prevent the consolidation of employers, who use their market power to suppress wages. Since the 1970s, Americans have seen inequality skyrocket--and job opportunities stagnate. There are many theories of why this happened, including the decline of organized labor, changes in technology, and the introduction of tax policies that favored the rich. A missing piece of the puzzle is the consolidation of employers, which has resulted in limited competition in labor markets. This should have been addressed by antitrust law, but was not. In How Antitrust Law Failed Workers, Eric Posner documents the failure of antitrust law to address labor market concentration. Only through reforming antitrust law can we shield workers from employers' overwhelming market power. Antitrust law is well-known for its role in combatting mergers, price-fixing arrangements, and other anticompetitive actions in product markets. By opposing these practices, antitrust law enhances competition among firms and keeps prices low for goods and services. Less well-known, antitrust law also applies to anticompetitive conduct by employers in labor markets, which pushes wages below the competitive rate. Yet there have been few labor market cases or enforcement actions, and almost no scholarly commentary on the role of antitrust law in labor markets. This book fills the gap. It explains why antitrust law has failed to address labor market concentration, and how it can be reformed so that it does a better job. Essential reading for anyone interested in fighting economic inequality, How Antitrust Failed Workers also offers a sharp primer on the true nature of the American economyDLone that is increasingly uncompetitive and tilted against workers.

Does Antitrust Need to be Modernized?

Does Antitrust Need to be Modernized? PDF Author: Dennis W. Carlton
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Antitrust law
Languages : en
Pages : 30

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Antitrust Paradigm

The Antitrust Paradigm PDF Author: Jonathan B. Baker
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674238958
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Get Book Here

Book Description
A new and urgently needed guide to making the American economy more competitive at a time when tech giants have amassed vast market power. The U.S. economy is growing less competitive. Large businesses increasingly profit by taking advantage of their customers and suppliers. These firms can also use sophisticated pricing algorithms and customer data to secure substantial and persistent advantages over smaller players. In our new Gilded Age, the likes of Google and Amazon fill the roles of Standard Oil and U.S. Steel. Jonathan Baker shows how business practices harming competition manage to go unchecked. The law has fallen behind technology, but that is not the only problem. Inspired by Robert Bork, Richard Posner, and the “Chicago school,” the Supreme Court has, since the Reagan years, steadily eroded the protections of antitrust. The Antitrust Paradigm demonstrates that Chicago-style reforms intended to unleash competitive enterprise have instead inflated market power, harming the welfare of workers and consumers, squelching innovation, and reducing overall economic growth. Baker identifies the errors in economic arguments for staying the course and advocates for a middle path between laissez-faire and forced deconcentration: the revival of pro-competitive economic regulation, of which antitrust has long been the backbone. Drawing on the latest in empirical and theoretical economics to defend the benefits of antitrust, Baker shows how enforcement and jurisprudence can be updated for the high-tech economy. His prescription is straightforward. The sooner courts and the antitrust enforcement agencies stop listening to the Chicago school and start paying attention to modern economics, the sooner Americans will reap the benefits of competition.

Labor Antitrust's Paradox

Labor Antitrust's Paradox PDF Author: Hiba Hafiz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Growing inequality, the decline in labor's share of national income, and increasing evidence of labor market concentration and employer buyer power are all subjects of national attention, eliciting wide-ranging proposals for legal reform. Many proposals hinge on labor market fixes and empowering workers within and beyond existing work law or through tax-and-transfer schemes. But a recent surge of interest focuses on applying antitrust law in labor markets, or “labor antitrust.” These proposals call for more aggressive enforcement by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) as well as stronger legal remedies for employer collusion and unlawful monopsony that suppresses workers' wages. The turn to labor antitrust is driven in part by congressional gridlock and the collapse of labor law as a dominant source of labor market regulation, inviting regulation through other means. Labor antitrust promises an effective attack because agency discretion and judicial enforcement can police labor markets without substantial amendments to existing law, bypassing the current impasse in Congress. Further, unlike labor and employment law, labor antitrust is uniquely positioned to challenge industry-wide wage suppression; suing multiple employers is increasingly challenging in work law as a statutory, doctrinal, and procedural matter.But current labor antitrust proposals, while fruitful, are fundamentally limited in two ways. First, echoing a broader antitrust policy crisis, they inherit and reinvigorate debates about the current consumer welfare goal of antitrust. The proposals ignore that, as a theoretical and practical matter, employers' anticompetitive conduct in labor markets does not necessarily harm consumers. As a result, workers' labor antitrust challenges will face an uphill battle under current law: where consumers are not harmed, labor antitrust can neither effectively police employer buyer power nor fill gaps in labor market regulation left by a retreating labor law. Second, the proposals ignore real synergies between antitrust enforcement and labor regulation that could preempt the rise of employer buyer power and contain its exercise.This Essay analyzes the limitations of current labor antitrust proposals and argues for regulatory sharing between antitrust and labor law to combat the adverse effects of employer buyer power. It makes three key contributions. First, it frames the new labor antitrust as disrupting a grand regulatory bargain, reinforced by the Chicago School, that segregated labor and antitrust regulation to resolve a perceived paradox in serving two masters: workers and consumers. The dominance of the consumer welfare standard resolved that paradox. Second, it explains how scholarly attempts to invigorate labor antitrust fail to overcome this paradox and ignore theoretical and doctrinal roadblocks to maximizing both worker and consumer welfare, leaving worker plaintiffs vulnerable to failure. Third, it proposes a novel restructuring of labor market regulation that integrates antitrust and labor law enforcement to achieve coherent and effective regulation of employer buyer power. It refocuses labor antitrust claims on consumer welfare ends and relegates worker welfare considerations to a labor law supplemented and fortified by the creation of substantive presumptions and defenses triggered by labor antitrust findings as well as labor agency involvement in merger review.

Antitrust enforcement

Antitrust enforcement PDF Author: United States. Congress. House. Committee on Small Business. Subcommittee on Antitrust, Consumers, and Employment
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Small business
Languages : en
Pages : 780

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Causes and Consequences of Antitrust

The Causes and Consequences of Antitrust PDF Author: Fred S. McChesney
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226556352
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 426

Get Book Here

Book Description
Why has antitrust legislation not lived up to its promise of promoting free-market competition and protecting consumers? Assessing 100 years of antitrust policy in the United States, this book shows that while the antitrust laws claim to serve the public good, they are as vulnerable to the influence of special interest groups as are agricultural, welfare, or health care policies. Presenting classic studies and new empirical research, the authors explain how antitrust caters to self-serving business interests at the expense of the consumer. The contributors are Peter Asch, George Bittlingmayer, Donald J. Boudreaux, Malcolm B. Coate, Louis De Alessi, Thomas J. DiLorenzo, B. Epsen Eckbo, Robert B. Ekelund, Jr., Roger L. Faith, Richard S. Higgins, William E. Kovacic, Donald R. Leavens, William F. Long, Fred S. McChesney, Mike McDonald, Stephen Parker, Richard A. Posner, Paul H. Rubin, Richard Schramm, Joseph J. Seneca, William F. Shughart II, Jon Silverman, George J. Stigler, Robert D. Tollison, Charlie M. Weir, Peggy Wier, and Bruce Yandle.

An Antitrust Exemption for Workers

An Antitrust Exemption for Workers PDF Author: A. Douglas Melamed
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Based on economic analysis that indicates the moderate worker bargaining power when negotiating with employers leads to increases in downstream output and lower prices as well as increases in wages and employment, we propose legislation that establishes an antitrust exemption to permit the formation of voluntary worker associations that enable workers to engage in joint negotiation (i.e., collective bargaining) with employer firms that are likely to have “monopsony bargaining power,” that is, either “classical” monopsony power or a dominant degree of bargaining power. Members of the associations, which we call “joint negotiating entities” or “JNEs”, could include both those workers deemed to be “employees” under employment law and, in some situations, those regarded as independent contractors. For the purposes of the antitrust laws, each JNE would be treated as a single entity that is owned by its worker-members and generally subject to the same antitrust treatment as other single entities. The JNEs would be easier to form than unions, but JNEs would have fewer rights and less power than traditional unions and would thus be unlikely to become monopoly sellers of labor. While the proposed antitrust exemption and related worker protections would be limited, they nonetheless could lead to benefits for both workers and downstream consumers, whose interests would not conflict.