Showing papers by "Robert H. Lande published in 1985"

Reducing Unions' Monopoly Power: Costs and Benefits

Abstract: THERE is a fundamental conflict between labor law and antitrust law. The antitrust laws reflect the powerful idea that competition should usually dictate the way our economy is organized, to the benefit of the economy as a whole, including workers. But the labor exemption to the antitrust laws suggests a different policy: workers should have the right to eliminate competition for wages, hours, and working conditions. We plan to examine a key feature of the labor exemption to the antitrust laws: the longstanding policy of allowing the workers of several firms, and even of an entire industry, to bargain as a unit and the corresponding policy of allowing all affected employers to bargain together in opposition. We compare this system to an alternative proposal-allowing the workers of each company to form a union but examining the mergers of those unions by the standards of merger guidelines. Throughout this paper we assume that if two unions cannot merge they also cannot conspire to fix wages, strike, and so forth, in accordance with "normal" antitrust principles. We begin by attempting to determine the primary goals of the industrywide features of the labor exemption to the antitrust laws. Using Con-