Inequality and the Labor Market: The Case for Greater Competition

Sharon Block · Benjamin H. Harris

Apr 2021 · Brookings Institution Press

About this ebook

Exploring a new agenda to improve outcomes for American workers

As the United States continues to struggle with the impact of the devastating COVID-19 recession, policymakers have an opportunity to redress the competition problems in our labor markets. Making the right policy choices, however, requires a deep understanding of long-term, multidimensional problems. That will be solved only by looking to the failures and unrealized opportunities in anti-trust and labor law.

For decades, competition in the U.S. labor market has declined, with the result that American workers have experienced slow wage growth and diminishing job quality. While sluggish productivity growth, rising globalization, and declining union representation are traditionally cited as factors for this historic imbalance in economic power, weak competition in the labor market is increasingly being recognized as a factor as well.

This book by noted experts frames the legal and economic consequences of this imbalance and presents a series of urgently needed reforms of both labor and anti-trust laws to improve outcomes for American workers. These include higher wages, safer workplaces, increased ability to report labor violations, greater mobility, more opportunities for workers to build power, and overall better labor protections.

Inequality in the Labor Market will interest anyone who cares about building a progressive economic agenda or who has a marked interest in labor policy. It also will appeal to anyone hoping to influence or anticipate the much-needed progressive agenda for the United States. The book's unusual scope provides prescriptions that, as Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz notes in the introduction, map a path for rebalancing power, not just in our economy but in our democracy.

Ratings and reviews

If it was up to our president, the progressives, and the author of this book all of our jobs would be union jobs. No thank you. I don't want a future where every job is union, a lot of people don't. Look at the corruption of the teachers union. If every union is even slightly similar to that, our country would turn to a third world country just from lack of production. And then to say wages. I laugh louder. Our employer, our city has raised wages by 20% - 50% since covid started. You know why? To compete with $700+ check a week people are getting from the government on unemployment. Yet we still can't hire people, we still can't get to even 75% staffing. You need inclusion into the workforce. That is what is most needed. More people working or in simple terms, Donald Trump's unemployment rate.

About the author

"Sharon Block is the former executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, where she also teaches. Before coming to Harvard, she served eight years in the Obama administration in senior positions at the Department ofLabor, the National Labor Relations Board, and the White House. Prior to the Obamaadministration, she served as Senior Labor and Employment Counsel for Senator Edward Kennedy on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. She currentlyserves as the Associate Administrator, Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Officeof Management and Budget.Benjamin H. Harris is a counselor to the U.S. Treasury Secretary. He previously served as the chief economist with Results for America, the executive director of the Kellogg Public-Private Initiative at the Kellogg School of Management, and chief economist to Vice President Joe Biden in the Obama White House."