Many of the Biden Administration’s antitrust enforcement actions have involved attempts to regulate anticompetitive conduct in labor markets by means of the antitrust laws. Recently, for example, DOJ has criminally prosecuted defendants for allegedly engaging in wage-fixing and using “no-poach” agreements to restrict competition. And it has successfully blocked a proposed merger using a novel, labor-centric theory. Biden’s FTC, meanwhile, has proposed a rule restricting the use of noncompete agreements. 

But some recent labor-market enforcement attempts have floundered: High-profile criminal prosecutions keep resulting in acquittals. So the question becomes: “What do those losses mean for labor-side antitrust law?”