Monopoly, Organized Labor, and Antitrust - Wealth & Poverty Class 5
The ongoing struggle between labor and capital
Friends, good morning.
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 percent of the European (and Canadian) workforces unionized than in the United States? What’s the relationship between degrees of monopolization, levels of unionization, and inequality, and why?
Click here for the Class 5 slides.
Looking for another session? Click the link for: Class 1, Class 2, Class 3, Class 4, Class 6, Class 7, Class 8, Class 9, Class 10, Class 11, Class 12, Class 13, Class 14.
Readings for you —
On organized labor:
Steven Greenhouse, “How Walmart Persuades Its Workers Not to Organize,” The Atlantic, June 8, 2015
Madland, “Wage Boards for American Workers,” Center for American Progress, April 2018
On monopolization:
Having been a union delegate at the old 'Bell Telephone Co.' and reiterating that working for that firm was the best job I'd ever had. It boggles my mind to hear any working class American to; A) bad mouth a labor union and B) vote republican. Those two happenings alone, I feel speak to the patented 'dumbing down of America' and our corporately bought, sold and corrupted fourth estate, and it's contrived onslaught of mis and dis information pablum fed our dumbed down populace. But divide and conquer is a basic tenet of war. And the war against organized labor IS one of the longest wars in history. The corporate barrage of inhumane and diverse weaponry fired down upon the American workforce is overwhelming, constant and historic .
A great class! A great service! After listening to you for an hour and a half, I'm left with a lot to digest. To have a fuller understanding of what you have said, I need to read your reading list. You can call it "afterwork." You need to BEG your readers to read those articles to maximize the value of the time spent! I know a lot about economics, majored in economics in college, 74 yrs old and have spent a lifetime reading and living economics. Yet every class you manage to slap me in the face with something. Today it was the chart on consolidation by industry and the chart on the decline of unions and the growth of the top 10% income. Both of these I was aware of but seeing them in a chart form was sobering. The failure of our democracy, our generation. is the loss of the excitement that can go along with learning. We have become a people of facts without knowledge. Read Daniel Kahneman's, Thinking, Fast & Slow. Read Roosevelt Montas's. Rescuing Socrates. We live in a world where a psychotic autocrat can destroy this world in seconds. We think fast because we haven't taken the time to think slow. Dr Reich forces us to think SLOW!