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Re:Big companies collude to hold down pay. by _delirium on Thursday September 16, 2010 @11:58PM (#1700078)
An interesting flip on the right-to-work laws. Those are usually targeted at union-negotiated exclusivity provisions, e.g. if a company and a union sign an agreement that the company will hire only members of that union, states with "right-to-work" laws hold any such contracts unenforceable. It'd be interesting if the principle were extended to ban any contract that interfered with the ability of two parties to come to terms, though. For example, if I have a right-to-work as a programming employee, do I also have a right-to-consult as a programming contractor, rendering any exclusivity provisions standing in the way void?

It seems to me like the principle should be similar. If a company has an exclusive-vendor agreement with an engineering-consulting firm for all its engineering services, that seems very much like the case where the company has an exclusive-hire agreement with an engineering union for all its engineering employees (just think of the union as a labor-selling firm). In both cases they've agreed to only purchase a certain category of services from a certain category of providers. I'd be somewhat amenable to banning all these kinds of exclusivity agreements (including non-compete, no-poaching, union-labor-only, exclusive-vendor, etc.).

Re:Big companies collude to hold down pay. by btilly on Friday September 17, 2010 @01:04AM (#1700205)
The problem is that even if you made a contract between the colluding companies unenforceable, the companies would be glad to collude anyways because it is in their best interest to maintain the agreement.