The views expressed here are the author’s own and do not reflect those of the Federal Trade Commission or any of its Commissioners.
The views expressed here are the author’s own and do not reflect those of the Department of Justice.
Due to a lack of competition among employers in the labor market, employers have monopsony power, or power to pay workers less than what the workers contribute to the employers’ bottom line. “Worker power” is workers’ ability to obtain higher wages and better working conditions.
The author is grateful to comments and questions from Lee Fennell, Brian Galle, Michael Pollack, and the participants of the Symposium on Slices & Lumps: Division and Aggregation in Law and Life. She is especially grateful to Lee Fennell and Omri Ben-Shahar for the invitation to participate in the Symposium.
Professor Lee Fennell’s groundbreaking Slices and Lumps incisively reconceptualizes how the gig—or “slicing”—economy impacts the structuring of work. But it goes even further to alert us to how “delumping the working experience” (p 6) can transform the infrastructure of work, from an individual’s task design to the agglomeration costs and benefits of untying and retying workers to desks, work to benefits, and worksites to surrounding communities.
I am deeply grateful to Eric Posner, Sanjukta Paul, Brian Callaci, and the participants of the Reassessing the Chicago School of Antitrust Law Symposium for their helpful comments and suggestions.
