How Antitrust Failed Workers

A tight, progressive reasoning for the exercise of antitrust labor market protection. -- Kirkus This important book develops the 'new learning' about labor market power. The returns to capital and those to labor have diverged sharply, reducing labor's participation rate in business profits. One reason is that labor markets are smaller than we once thought, giving employers more power to suppress wages. As Posner explains with clarity and force, antitrust has too often looked askance when confronted with anticompetitive practices targeting labor, such as overly aggressive noncompetition agreements, franchise restraints on worker mobility, and mergers that put downward pressure on wages. An important read for anyone interested in policy concerning competition, labor, and economic equality. -- Herbert Hovenkamp, James G. Dinan University Professor, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School Antitrust law has long turned a blind eye to the role of employer market power in slow wage growth and growing inequality. Eric Posner provides a much-needed corrective with his compelling, comprehensive and carefully reasoned documentation of the failures of the current system. More importantly, Posner lays out a reform agenda to address everything from outright collusion in wage setting to noncompete agreements. This book should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the problems with American labor markets or is seeking to fix them. -- Jason Furman, Former Chair Council of Economic Advisers and Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy, Harvard University Recent decades have seen a big shift in the balance of power in the job market away from workers and toward big employers, and it has contributed to the rise in inequality. Posner explains how antitrust policy might have helped prevent it and reduce inequality. Antitrust fights anticompetitive practices that harm consumers and it could fight anticompetitive practices in the job market that harm workers the same way. The book melds the new economic thinking on the topic with Posner's keen legal insight in an accessible way. -- Austan Goolsbee, Former Chairman of Council of Economic Advisers and Robert P. Gwinn Professor of Economics, the University of Chicago Booth School of Business