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Hot of the press, the @CompBureau has issued a statement on how it plans to assess non-poaching and wage-fixing agreements. If you care about fair wages and workers rights, then this is VERY important. A thread/1 https://www.canada.ca/en/competition-bureau/news/2020/11/competition-bureau-statement-on-the-application-of-the-competition-act-to-no-poaching-wage-fixing-and-other-buy-side-agreements.html #canlab
In short, the bureau won’t be criminally prosecuting firms that fix (suppress) wags or prevent workers from getting jobs at other firms. Instead, these agreements will fall under civil provisions of the Competition Act. Specifically, section 90.1. /2
This means that it will be much harder to prosecute firms that collude to suppress workers. First, the Commissioner must find that and agreement exists. Second, they must find that the agreement substantially lessens or prevents competition. This is a hard test to meet./3
Under criminal provisions, you only need to prove the first point. This is a split from US guidelines issued four years earlier, which state that these agreements would be criminally prosecuted if they are “unrelated or unnecessary to a larger legitimate collaboration /4
collaboration between the employers.” It took years for the Bureau to issue a statement on this issue, which signals to me that worker welfare is not a priority within Canada’s competition policy or of Bureau leadership. There is more evidence of this ambivalence. /5
The efficiencies defense for mergers, embedded in our legislation, REWARDS FIRMS THAT LAY OFF WORKERS by allowing them to merge, even if the merger will harm competition. As of 2016, no other country in the world does this. /6
Also, based on information I could find, the Bureau has never seriously investigated competition issues related to labour markets and workers. This is not normal, compared to other jurisdictions. Labour unions, you NEED to be talking about these issues! /7
If labour representatives don’t start asking hard questions to the Bureau and elected officials, our competition policy will keep ignoring and hurting workers./8 #canlab
