Читать книгу Inequality and the Labor Market - Группа авторов - Страница 22

This volume outlines several essential steps to redress the imbalances and rein in the power of employers. It offers ideas on how we can rewrite the rules of the economy to make the labor market more competitive and prevent the anticompetitive practices employers have systematically used to increase their market power. The chapters in this volume show that there is much that can be done at both the state and the national levels. For instance, mergers should be screened for effects on workers, just as they are already screened for effects on consumers. No-poach and noncompete agreements should be made per se illegal for low-wage workers.

We will never create a fully competitive labor market, nor will we ever fully curb corporate market power. This volume also provides a rich policy agenda for how to redress the imbalances of market power. We need to strengthen unions and the ability of workers and consumers to work together, collectively, to combat employer and corporate market power. Again, there is a rich agenda for how that can be done.

It is important also to emphasize that we will never fully redress these imbalances through pro-competition reforms alone. We will still need other tools such as minimum wages and safe working conditions to protect workers, especially the most vulnerable among them. To raise wages and ensure dignity at work, we must commit to constraining excesses of market power wherever they arise and to building countervailing power to restore a better balance. Employers and employees need to be able to bargain on more-equal footing. Achieving this balance will increase not only equity but also efficiency.

The original progressive agenda at the end of the 19th century fought to curb corporate market power, but the battle was about more than economics—it was about power and politics, too. We face the same struggle today. Rebalancing power is essential to protecting our democracy.