Throughout 2018, the employment practices of many U.S. companies were subject to increasingly intense pressure when it came to antitrust practices. Though the year is still young, it looks like 2019 is only gong to see this trend continue to grow.
Consider that at the federal level, the Department of Justice went after several companies for “no-poach” agreements last year. The DOJ prosecuted these companies because no-poach agreements, in which businesses that are competitors promise not to hire each other’s employees, are notoriously unfair to workers.
Meanwhile, right here in Texas, the Federal Trade Commission partnered with the Texas Attorney General’s office to bring enforcement action against a therapist staffing company for engaging in wage-fixing. For those that don’t remember, the FTC settled charges with Your Therapy Source, its owner, and its former owner, for lowering therapist pay rates in attempt to drive wages down. The owners’ plan was apparently to fix their therapists’ rates at the same level while inviting their competitors to do the same, so their therapists wouldn’t switch companies in an attempt to get paid more.
In Silicon Valley, concern about antitrust enforcement in the tech sector also continues to build. Facebook recently announced plans to merge services Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp, in a move that has already caught the eye of federal regulators. Others have raised concern about Amazon’s dominance over the e-commerce market, of which it controls nearly 50%, and how Google skews search results in favor of its own products.
Yet as the case Your Therapy Source case demonstrates, it’s not just antitrust regulation against major corporations that American workers need to worry about. “Smaller businesses do it as well,” Marshall Auerbach recently pointed out at Salon. “They too have an incentive to ‘scale up’ via a trade association to maximize the impact of their ‘political investment.’ Change the incentives in ‘pay to play,’ and size becomes less of a polluting impact on the American polity.”
What Auerbach is arguing is that when companies of any size try to bend antitrust law to influence the financial market or political landscape in the favor, American workers almost always end up suffering. That’s why, from Texas to Silicon Valley, it’s important that there are hard-working legal minds willing to holding these companies accountable.
Mathias Raphael PLLC Accident & Injury Lawyers: Fighting for Texas Workers
At Mathias Raphael PLLC Accident & Injury Lawyers, our Dallas antitrust lawyers are committed to protecting the rights of Texas workers. We even provide free consultations, because we believe everyone deserves a chance at justice, regardless of their budget. From antitrust, to employee discrimination, to whistleblower cases, we have the skills and the resources to provide comprehensive and thoughtful legal advocacy. When you need a business litigation firm that will fight for you, you know who to call.
Dial (214) 739-0100 now to speak to an attorney, or fill out our contact form online