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    Antitrust Law Journal

    Volume 85, Issue 3

    “Aiming at Dollars, Not Men”: Recovering the Congressional Intent Behind the Labor Exemption to Antitrust Law

    Alvaro Bedoya and Bryce Tuttle

    Mar 12, 2024

    25 min read

    Antitrust Antitrust Exemptions Antitrust Litigation & Enforcement Antitrust Policy & Legislation Horizontal Agreements Joint Conduct

    Summary

    • Antitrust law has been used to stop a range of worker organizing efforts in the late 20th and early 21st centuries—despite the existence of a labor exemption. This article explains that these actions contradict Congress’s intent in passing of the Sherman, Clayton, and Norris-LaGuardia Acts.
    • This article traces the back and forth between congressional efforts to create a broad labor exemption and judicial efforts to sharply limit its breadth.
    • It concludes with an analysis of a recent First Circuit case which, in the authors’ view, represents a more faithful application of the labor exemption. 
    “Aiming at Dollars, Not Men”: Recovering the Congressional Intent Behind the Labor Exemption to Antitrust Law
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    "We are aiming at the gigantic trusts and combinations of capital and not at associations of men for the betterment of their condition. We are aiming at the dollars and not at men. . . . Let us put the man above the dollar and exempt all associations of men organized for the betterment of their condition."

    – Representative Thomas F. Konop (D., Wisconsin), June 1, 1914

    Antitrust law has been used by courts to stop a range of worker-organizing efforts in the late 20th and early 21st centuries—despite the existence of a labor exemption. This article explains that these actions contradict Congress’s intent in passing the Sherman, Clayton, and Norris-LaGuardia Acts. To understand legislative intent and how the courts misapplied the antitrust laws to labor, it is necessary to look at the history of the antitrust laws and how the labor exemption became law in the first place.

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