Protection of Lawful Commerce in Stone Slab Products Act

— 613 — Department of Labor and Related Agencies l Congress must amend the law so that employers can again have the freedom to make hiring Americans a priority. Despite the significant advantages that preferring citizens over (work-authorized) aliens in hiring would provide to American workers, businesses, and the country at large, such a practice has been illegal since 1986.25 This makes no sense. Alternative View Some conservatives believe that the government has a duty to limit its spending in order to limit how much it takes from American families. This means that when the government spends money, it must find the most econom- ical and effective way to do so. Excessive government spending will be borne by American workers and families through reduced incomes and purchasing power. There may be good reasons to require a certain percentage of American workers on federal contracts, but those decisions should be based on economy and efficiency as opposed to arbitrary quotas. Visa Fraud. American businesses that commit visa fraud and hire illegal immi- grants should not be the beneficiaries of federal spending. But a 2020 report by the Department of Labor’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) examined the depart- ment’s process for excluding employers who commit visa fraud and abuse from federal contracts and found much to be desired. l To protect the American workforce from unscrupulous immigration lawyers, employers, and labor brokers, the department must follow the recommendations of the OIG and institute more robust investigations for suspected visa fraud and speedier debarments for those found guilty. INTERNATIONAL LABOR POLICY Leveling the International Playing Field for Workers. As recent decades of intense import competition and offshoring have made clear, American workers suffer when the U.S. opens its markets to foreign nations’ minimal labor standards and exploitative conditions. While federal law already prohibits the importation of goods produced with forced labor, the prohibitions are toothless without effective means of enforcement and cover only the most basic of workers’ rights. The Trump Administration and its United States Trade Representative (USTR) took unprece- dented steps to redress the issue for workers. The U.S.–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA) contained the strongest and most far-reaching labor provisions of any free trade agreement (FTA), with protections and commitments to reduce labor abuses and raise wages. It also established new modes of enforcement. For future FTAs, the USTR should replicate the labor provisions of USMCA, especially the provisions to: — 614 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise l Eliminate all forms of forced or compulsory labor. l Protect workers’ rights to organize and participate voluntarily in a union without employer interference or discrimination. l Create a rapid-response mechanism to provide for an independent panel investigation of denial of labor rights at covered facilities. l Shift the burden of proof by presuming that an alleged violation affects trade and investment, unless otherwise demonstrated. For future authorizations of Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), the President should urge Congress to: l Create mechanisms for supply-chain transparency. l Institute a general prohibition on forced labor conditions. Investigate Foreign Labor Violations That Undermine American Work- ers. The United States’ embrace of globalization has exposed American workers to unfair competition from nations with cheap, abundant, and often exploited labor. American workers have, as a consequence, seen their earning power erode. While negotiating stronger trade agreements with robust labor provisions should be the primary tool with which to regulate international labor competition, the federal government can also take steps to identify the worst labor abuses and rule breakers. DOL’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB) plays a critical role in monitor- ing and enforcing the labor provisions of U.S. trade agreements and trade preference programs as well as investigating child labor and human trafficking violations. l The next Administration should focus ILAB investigations on foreign labor violations that do the most to damage American workers’ earning power, specifically regimes that engage in child and forced labor, fail to protect workers’ organizing rights, and permit hazardous or otherwise exploitative working conditions. Alternative/Additional View. Conservatives share a belief in protecting and pro- moting American workers and their families and orienting international policies with Americans’ interests first. Some conservatives believe that the best way to put Amer- ica first is by making America more attractive. In addition to restrictions imposed on other countries, removing existing barriers to American manufacturing, employ- ment, and commerce can help American workers, entrepreneurs, and families.

— 869 — 30 FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION Adam Candeub MISSION/OVERVIEW America’s antitrust laws are over a century old. In 1890, the U.S. Congress enacted the Sherman Act,1 the first federal prohibition on trusts and restraints of trade. The Clayton Act,2 adopted in 1914, builds upon the Sherman Act, outlawing certain practices, such as price fixing, while bringing other business combinations, such as mergers and acquisitions, under regulatory scrutiny. The Federal Trade Commission Act (FTCA),3 also adopted in 1914, gives the federal government legal tools to combat anticompetitive, unfair, and deceptive practices in the marketplace, empowering the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to enforce provisions of the Sherman and Clayton Acts. The FTCA prohibits “unfair methods of competition and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce.” Sections 3, 7, and 8 of the Clayton Act empower the FTC to block unlawful tying contracts, unlawful corporate mergers and acquisitions, and inter- locking directorates. Under an amendment to the FTCA, the Robinson–Patman Act,4 the FTC has authority to prohibit practices involving discriminatory pricing and product promotion. While the FTC has enforcement or administrative respon- sibilities under more than 70 laws, the FTCA and the Clayton Act are the focus of its regulatory energy. FTC actions, therefore, turn on the antitrust principles and market principles it adopts. Modern approaches to antitrust stress that the objective of antitrust law is to assure a competitive economy—which in economic terms maximizes both allocative efficiency (optimal distribution of goods and services, taking into account consumer’s preferences, so that prices tend toward marginal cost) and productive — 870 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise efficiency (using the least amount of resources for optimal output)—and thereby maximizes consumer welfare.5 Recently, however, many in the conservative movement have taken a broader view of antitrust. They point out that the authors of our antitrust laws did not intend this purely economic understanding of competitive markets—and the normative assumptions that undergird it—to guide their legislation. First, these principles were only imperfectly worked out at the time the antitrust laws were passed. Second, contemporaneous statements concerning the Sherman and Clay- ton Acts demonstrate Congress’s concern about the political and economic power of the oil and railroad trusts of the first Gilded Age, and their influence on dem- ocratic institutions and civil society. Antitrust law can combat dominant firms’ baleful effects on democratic institutions such as free speech, the marketplace of ideas, shareholder control, and managerial accountability as well as collusive behavior with government. Republican Senator John Sherman explained to Congress in support of his eponymous legislation: If we will not endure a king as a political power, we should not endure a king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor, we should not submit to an autocrat of trade, with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.6 Similarly, identifying the institutional threats that market concentration can pose, the former Republican President and future Supreme Court Justice William Howard Taft wrote at the time, The federal antitrust law is one of the most important statutes ever passed in this country. It was a step taken by Congress to meet what the public had found to be a growing and intolerable evil in combinations between many who had capital employed in a branch of trade, industry, or transportation, to obtain control of it, regulate prices, and make unlimited profit. Taft saw in this economic threat broader implications for American society since “the building of great and powerful corporations which had, many of them, intervened in politics and through use of corrupt machines and bosses threatened us with a plutocracy.”7 Others in the conservative movement have maintained for numerous decades that an economic justification is the only coherent approach to the antitrust laws. Many view the first 90 years of U.S. antitrust policy as unprincipled in its approach, often resulting in policies that, by trying to protect smaller competitors, ended up