The decline in unionization and moves by employers to prevent workers from changing jobs have undermined competition in the US labor market, driving down wages for Americans by 20%, the Department of the Interior reported Monday. Treasure.
The cost of anticompetitive measures is “severe” and “great enough to significantly change a family’s standard of living,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said during a roundtable discussion with workers affected by these practices.
US President Joe Biden has repeatedly blamed business consolidation for driving up prices, and last year he signed an executive order aimed at increasing competition in the world’s largest economy.
Treasury conducted a study, a product of the Biden order, to look at the impact of increased consolidation on workers.
The report concluded that “the US labor market is far from the perfect competition that economists had long assumed, due to employer concentration and anti-competitive labor practices.”
It is a “major problem, and the lack of competition causes a wage drop of almost 20% for workers, in relation to what they would otherwise earn,” he details.
The report specifically targets business practices such as classifying employees as contractors and making them sign non-compete agreements, which restrict the industries in which they can work after leaving a position.
Those measures “have forced workers to accept lower wages and worse working conditions.”
The Treasury indicated that increasing antitrust enforcement measures, making it easier for employees to unionize and raising the minimum wage could improve competition.
While wages have risen as the US economy has recovered from the pandemic, inflation has also soared to levels not seen in four decades, with the Biden administration increasingly trying to blame businesses for rising wages. prices.
Biden has backed raising the national minimum wage to $15 an hour, but the proposal has gone nowhere in Congress, where his Democratic lawmakers have a slim majority in both chambers.
AFP
Source: Larepublica
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