Class 5: “Monopoly, Labor, and Antitrust” by UC Berkeley Professor Reich
Our fifth class begins our focus on power — and on the relative power of workers and the corporations that hire or contract with them. It’s one of the oldest struggles inside the American economy and within capitalism worldwide: between labor and capital. And it has a direct effect on inequality. The way we’ll approach it is by looking at two sides of the same legal coin: antitrust laws designed to contain the market power of corporations, and labor laws designed to allow workers to organize. What we’ll see is that both sets of laws have been changed over the last forty years — giving corporations greater market power, and dramatically reducing the power of organized labor. We’ll examine why these changes have occurred.
Questions: What happened to antitrust in the United States over the last fifty years? What happened to labor unions? Why are antitrust (anti-monopoly) laws stronger in Europe than they are in the United States? Why is a higher percentage of the European (and Canadian) workforce unionized than in the United States? What’s the relationship between degrees of monopolization, levels of unionization, and inequality, and why?
I really am pleased to be able to bring you my Wealth and Poverty course, I hope you are enjoying it so far. This is the fifth class in the 14-week series.
Select readings from the syllabus are available at:
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/po...
Class Outline
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00:00 - Recap of prior classes
08:53 - Introduction to Class 5
10:43 - Market structure and bargaining power
15:42 - Monopolization and the antitrust response
27:56 - Time for antitrust again?
43:50 - Labor unions
59:50 - Labor law reform?
01:09:19 - Power
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