No-Poaching Agreements
No-poaching agreements appear in How we got free agents in baseball as the ordinary-employment comparison for Major League Baseball’s reserve clause. The episode says that agreements among companies such as Google and Apple not to hire each other’s workers are illegal because they suppress competition for labor.
The comparison helps generalize labor monopsony beyond sports. A worker does not need one formal employer to face restricted choice; coordinated employer behavior or league rules can also block outside offers and weaken wage bargaining.
The real horror of ‘Alien’ and how it explains why we’re not paid enough adds a neighboring mechanism through Non-Compete Agreements. No-poach agreements restrict employers from competing for workers; non-competes restrict workers from moving to competitors. Both can produce monopsony-like power by weakening credible outside offers.
Connections
- Google, Apple, Labor Monopsony, and Baseball Reserve Clause - comparison made by the source.
- Sports Player Autonomy, Sports Collective Bargaining, and Baseball Free Agency - adjacent labor-market power concepts.
- Non-Compete Agreements, Monopsony By Artifice, and Labor Search Frictions - adjacent worker-mobility restrictions added by the Alien labor-economics episode.