Declining worker power vs. rising monopoly power: explaining recent macro trends
Although the economy is a complex system and it's dangerous to try to over-simplify, my personal opinion is that there are two main and intertwined causes:<p>1) the cost to participate in the US court system.<p>2) the abuse of copyright, patent, trademark, and contract[1] law to divorce workers from their experience and treat employee knowledge as company property.<p>The time and money involved in both pursuing and defending court cases favors larger entities with armies of lawyers and large war chests. Intellectual "property" cases take especially vast amounts of resources because of the fuzziness involved. Meanwhile, treating workers as fungible producers of ideas that can be bought and sold both reduces the bargaining power of individual workers while empowering companies that can amass large portfolios of patents, etc. to use in litigation.<p>Not sure about reforms for the court system, but patent and copyright reform, combined with restrictions on unfair employment contracts, would go a long way to improving the situation.<p>[1] NDAs, NCAs, etc.