SANJUKTA PAUL
DETROIT – More than at any time in decades, reforms to both antitrust and labor law are being debated in law and policy circles. In the United States, a surge of worker organizing and collective action across a range of sectors – education, media, tech – has coincided with a wave of anti-monopoly initiatives. The emerging left wing of the Democratic Party champions both labor and anti-monopoly politics.
These two tendencies have arisen in response to the same decades-long trends: increasing economic inequality, the disempowerment of ordinary working people, and the unchecked concentration of power in the hands of a few individuals and corporations who are now making decisions on behalf of society as a whole. One key question, then, is to what extent the two reformist tendencies are compatible.
Some would argue that labor politics and anti-monopoly politics are at odds, or that labor law and antitrust law are opposed in principle. These claims are frequently rooted in memories of the mid-twentieth-century era of coordinated, oligopolistic industries with high union density. Antitrust skeptics’ implicit contention is that large firms in concentrated markets are more conducive to robust workers’ organizations.
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