Title Pending 562

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.Recent interest in antitrust reform has led to a corresponding interest in the theory of labor monopsony, or employer power to set wages, as a potential explanation for labor trends like wage stagnation and wage inequality. However, scholarly disagreement about the level of employer concentration and how strongly it correlates with suppressed wages suggests that concentration measures of employer power are overly narrow. A complete account of employer power requires incorporating labor market specific attributes that empower employers and disempower workers, as well as the impacts of public policies that have eroded worker protections from these market frictions. The explanatory force of public policy failures to protect workers demonstrates the primacy of political power, but the residual influence of Chicago School antitrust theory neglects political power as outside the study of “economic” areas of law. Law and Political Economy suggests this is an artificial division that privileges one particular vision of economic ordering within antitrust theory. This paper argues that political economy context is necessary to fully appreciate total employer power over labor, that is currently under-determined by antitrust scholarship focused exclusively on measures of market power.