ABSTRACT
The ‘commodified’ power of large firms, manifested in aggregate concentration and the markup, exacerbates inequality while the ‘countervailing’ power of organized labor, manifested in union density and strike activity, mitigates inequality. Unregulated economic systems are inherently unstable, and growing inequality has been the subject of much serious research. John Kenneth Galbraith further notes that, in contrast to assertions by right-to-work law advocates who actively seek to constrain union organizing, higher local inequality is consistently associated with higher rates of local unemployment. The chapter explores the dynamic structure of income inequality from the perspective of power relations within a polity, adapting tools from information and control theories. For Western and other ‘developed’ nations, the level of participation in independent labor unions appears to be a good ‘retina’ index of such power relations, and the dynamics themselves can be highly punctuated in a scalar ‘temperature’ constructed from that index.
