How Antitrust Failed Workers
Channel: New America
Date: 08/02/2022

Please join the Center on Education & Labor at New America for a discussion with Professor Eric Posner and presidential advisor Tim Wu on how antitrust policy can help workers. Over the last decade, antitrust has emerged as a critical tool for addressing growing inequality and is at the forefront of the Biden Administration’s efforts to build a more balanced economy. But while the negative impacts of market concentration on product markets and consumers is well-documented, its impact on labor markets and workers is less well-understood.

Professor Posner’s recent book, How Antitrust Failed Workers, fills that gap, explaining how market concentration – monopoly and oligopoly – renders labor markets less competitive while greatly enhancing the power of employers to suppress wages and hinder worker mobility. We will explore why workers have not been at the center of antitrust discussions, how antitrust law can be a tool for enhancing worker power, and how the Biden Administration is incorporating workers into its broader efforts to combat the negative consequences of market concentration.

Follow the conversation and provide live questions and commentary on Twitter with the hashtag #AntitrustFailed and by following the new Twitter handle @NewAmericaLabor.

Speakers:

Eric A. Posner
Kirkland and Ellis Distinguished Service Professor of Law, University of Chicago

Tim Wu
Special Assistant to the President for Technology and Competition Policy, National Economic Council

Moderator:

Mary Alice McCarthy, PhD
Director, Center on Education & Labor, New America


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