Public policy and labour market competition

Abstract

The last decade has witnessed a number of remarkable developments in public policy, laws and law enforcement that have been associated with failures of competition in US labour markets. These include: (1) enforcement actions and antitrust law suits regarding explicit conspiracies to suppress competition in labour markets; (2) the documentation and forced abolition of franchise contracts that include worker ‘no-poaching’ clauses; (3) explicit discussion of the regulation of mergers that affect labour market competition; and (4) legislation and regulation affecting ‘non-compete’ and ‘non-solicit’ clauses in employment contracts. In the following, I review the recent developments in public policy. I begin with a deconstruction of a particularly high-level conspiracy to reduce labour market competition in the High-Tech world.