Antitrust Strategies

While labor laws govern how workers interact with employers, antitrust law governs how employers interact with each other: Mergers, competitive tactics, and contracts between businesses in a supply, franchise, or contractor relationship all fall under antitrust jurisdiction. Antitrust enforcers have the power to block mergers, impose triple-damage fines, and even send executives to jail. Brian Callaci from the Open Markets Institute will walk you through what the intervention points are, how to poke through the jargon and economic models, and how other worker organizations have been able to successfully take advantage of the current antitrust moment.

Brian Callaci is the chief economist at the Open Markets Institute. He researches and writes about market structure, antitrust law, and their relationship to worker and employer power. In addition to peer-reviewed academic research, he publishes articles in popular outlets such as The Atlantic, Harvard Business Review, and The New Republic, and gives expert testimony and policy advice to government bodies. His CV can be found here. Callaci received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Prior to working at the Open Markets Institute, he worked at the Strategic Organizing Center and Workers United/SEIU.

David Seligman is an attorney and the Executive Director of Towards Justice, a non-profit legal organization that helps workers and worker organizations to take on abuses of corporate power through litigation and policy advocacy. David has litigated several cases on behalf of workers under the antitrust and consumer protection laws to attack employer misconduct that seeks to sidestep employment law protections, including the first recent case to challenge franchise “no poach” agreements in contracts between fast food franchisors and their franchisees and a case under California antitrust laws against Uber and Lyft, which alleges that the companies can’t on the one hand deny their workers labor rights while also fixing their prices. Before coming to Towards Justice, David worked as a Staff Attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, where he helped low-income consumers take on predatory auto lending and forced arbitration. He clerked for judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and in the District of Massachusetts.