Nomadland and the Amazon labour monopsony

The New York Times tells us of Joan Robinson’s injection - perhaps reinjection as the idea is clearly there in Marx - of the idea of labour monopsony into economic discussions:

Crucially, Robinson argued that workers, as sellers of their own labor, almost always faced monopsonistic exploitation from employers, the buyers of their labor. This technical point had a political edge: According to Robinson, workers were being chronically underpaid, even by the standards of fairness devised by the high priests of the free market.

This certainly has happened, company towns were notorious for it. The closest the UK has been to chattel slavery this past millennium - domestically that is - is probably the example of certain remote Scottish coal mines. At a very much more superficial level Street in Somerset had no pubs - they were all immediately outside the area controlled by the Clark’s of the shoe company fame. This is why the Truck Acts where wages must be paid in cash, not company scrip. This is also a problem dealt with by the 1980s which is why the Truck Acts were repealed - simply not necessary in an age of personal mobility.

….a recent investigation by House Democrats concluded that Amazon deploys monopsony power and that its warehouses tend “to depress wages” for warehouse and logistics workers when they enter a local market.

Nomadland is, we agree, a film, it’s people playing dress up. It might even be art but it’s scripted drama, not a documentary. Still, the conceit is that those warehouses pull in labour from possibly thousands of miles away. That people travel hundreds of miles to work at them. There are echoes of the Joads in this but that tale, in all its grapey wrath, is of how the Model T frees from monopsony. The choices available might not please a progressive’s heart but choice is, by definition, the antithesis of either monopoly or monopsony.

A mobile force of 160 million people picking and choosing among millions of potential employers simply is not a labour market suffering from monopsony. That’s a tale that needs to be confined to the “once upon a time” section of the movie storage vault.