Labor Politics And Antitrust Enforcement In Labor Markets

The FTC and Antitrust Division held a workshop last week focused on labor issues, which superficially appears to be a continuation of the last Administration's policies. Since 2016 the agencies have warned the business community that agreements not to compete for workers may be charged criminally, and indeed have followed through on that threat. The DOJ has also alleged "monopsony" effects in a few merger cases, most recently in the publishing industry, claiming the transaction would depress what publishers paid to authors in certain circumstances. All of these cases fit easily into a traditional view of antitrust where the law is intended to protect the competitive process, not pick sides between management and labor in the way that labor laws do in an explicit way. Congress and the courts have navigated a coherent set of rules for when and how the labor laws and the antitrust laws interact with each other, with antitrust being about efficiency of markets and labor