Evelyn Reynolds

The Justice Department is using antitrust law to charge employers with colluding to hold down wages. The move adds to a barrage of civil challenges.Antitrust suits have long been part of the federal government’s arsenal to keep corporations from colluding or combining in ways that raise prices and hurt the consumer. Now the government is deploying the same weapon in another cause: protecting workers’ pay.In a first, the Justice Department has brought a series of criminal cases against employers for colluding to suppress wages. The push started in December 2020, under the Trump administration, with an indictment accusing a staffing agency in the Dallas-Fort Worth area of agreeing with rivals to suppress the pay of physical therapists. The department has now filed six criminal cases under the pillar of antitrust law, the Sherman Act, including prosecutions of employers of home health aides, nurses and aerospace engineers.“Labor market collusion dots the entirety of the U.S. economy,” said Doha Mekki, principal deputy assistant attorney general in the department’s antitrust division. “We’ve seen it in sectors across the board.”If the courts are swayed by the government’s arguments, they could drastically alter the relationship between workers and their employers across large swaths of the economy.“The expansion of Sherman Act criminal violations changes the ballgame when it comes to how companies engage with their workers,” noted an analysis by lawyers at White & Case, including J. Mark Gidley, chair of the firm’s global antitrust and competition practice. “Executives and managers could face jail time for proven horizontal wage-fixing conspiracies.” In addition to fines for corporations or individuals, the Sherman Act provides for prison terms of up to 10 years.The Biden administration is also deploying antitrust law in civil cases to shore up workers’ pay. And in another first, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit in November to stop Penguin Random House’s attempt to buy Simon & Schuster on the grounds that the resulting publishing Goliath would have the power to depress advances and royalty payments to authors.The move to block the publishers’ merger “declines to even allege the historically key antitrust harm — increased prices,” the White & Case lawyers argued. It is “emblematic of the Biden administration’s and the new populist antitrust movement’s push to direct the purpose of antitrust away from consumer welfare price effects and towards other social harms.”And yet the Justice Department’s push builds on a rationale for criminal antitrust enforcement articulated since the Obama administration. “Colluding to fix wages is no different than colluding to suppress the prices of auto parts or homes sold at auction,” said Renata Hesse, acting assistant attorney general for antitrust, in November 2016. “Naked wage-fixing or no-poach agreements eliminate competition in the same irredeemable way as per se unlawful price-fixing and customer-allocation agreements do.”The Biden administration has picked up the argument with a vengeance. Last summer, President Biden issued an executive order mandating a “whole of government” effort to promote competition across the economy. Last month, the Treasury Department issued a report on just how anticompetitive labor markets have become.Corporate America is alarmed. “In their minds, everything is an antitrust issue,” said Sean Heather, senior vice president for antitrust at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “There is a role for antitrust in labor markets,” he added. “But it is a limited one.”The State of Jobs in the United StatesJob openings and the number of workers voluntarily leaving their positions in the United States remained near record levels in March.March Jobs Report: U.S. employers added 431,000 jobs and the unemployment rate fell to 3.6 percent ​​in the third month of 2022.A Strong Job Market: Data from the Labor Department showed that job openings remained near record levels in February.New Career Paths: For some, the Covid-19 crisis presented an opportunity to change course. Here is how these six people pivoted professionally.Return to the Office: Many companies are loosening Covid safety rules, leaving people to navigate social distancing on their own. Some workers are concerned.The latest criminal indictment, brought in January against owners and managers of four home health care agencies in Portland, Maine, is emblematic of the new approach.According to the indictment, the agencies agreed to keep the wage of health aides at $16 to $17 an hour. They encouraged other agencies to sign on, prosecutors said, and threatened an agency that raised its pay to between $17 and $18.50.The agencies’ margin is essentially the difference between the wage and the reimbursement from the Maine Department of Health and Human Services. In April 2020, the department raised the rate to $26.20 an hour, from $20.52, explicitly to “fund pay raises for approximately 20,000 workers,” according to the indictment.The agencies’ agreement, the indictment said, was “a per se unlawful, and thus unreasonable, restraint of interstate trade and commerce in violation of Section l of the Sherman Act.”That blows directly against the position of the Chamber of Commerce. Last April, it filed a brief in a similar case, opposing the government’s argument against an outpatient medical care facility that agreed with a rival not to solicit each other’s employees. The Justice Department was overstepping, the brief argued, because the company couldn’t know the behavior was “per se” illegal — an outright breach of the law irrespective of its effects — since the government’s argument had not been tested in court.American companies “are entitled to fair notice of what conduct is and is not prohibited by the federal antitrust laws,” it argued. “Because no court has previously held that nonsolicitation agreements are per se illegal, this prosecution falls far short of the fair notice that due process requires.”A federal court in a separate case has since sided with the government’s interpretation. In November, Judge Amos L. Mazzant III of the United States District Court in the Eastern District of Texas denied a motion to dismiss a federal criminal indictment alleging wage-fixing at a staffing company providing physical therapists, agreeing that price fixing would be “per se” illegal and that the defendants had fair warning that their behavior was against the law.But beyond the legal wrangling brought about by the Justice Department’s new approach, there are striking examples of efforts by employers to suppress wages.“I suspect those things are all over the place,” said Ioana Marinescu, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy and Practice, whether it is employers hoarding highly paid computer engineers or chicken plants paying $15 an hour. “The benefits of collusion may not be super large, but if the costs are quite low, why not do it if you can extract profit?”Until recently, over half of all franchise agreements in the United States, at companies including McDonald’s, Jiffy Lube and H&R Block, included provisions barring franchisees from hiring one another’s workers, according to research by the economists Alan B. Krueger and Orley Ashenfelter. Economic analysis has found that suppressing competition for workers, reducing their options, generally means lower wages. After challenges from several state attorneys general, hundreds of companies abandoned the practice.Another study found that 18 percent of workers are under contracts that forbid moving to a competitor. Most are highly skilled and well paid. Employers who invest in their training can plausibly argue that the noncompete clauses protect their investment and prevent workers from taking valuable information to a rival.But such provisions cover 14 percent of less-educated workers and 13 percent of low-wage workers, who receive little or no training and hold no trade secrets. Several states have challenged the provisions in court. Some, including California, Oklahoma and North Dakota, have prohibited their enforcement.Then there is the litigation. There are civil cases from the 1990s: one by the Justice Department against the Utah Society for Healthcare Human Resources Administration and several hospitals in the state that shared wage information about registered nurses and matched one another’s wages, keeping their pay low. Lawsuits filed by nurses in 2006 accusing hospital systems of conspiring to suppress their wages led to multimillion-dollar settlements in Albany and Detroit.In 2007, the Justice Department sued the Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association for fixing the rates that hospitals paid to nursing agencies for their temporary nurses, putting a cap on their wages. In settling the case, the association agreed to abandon the practice.The pace picked up after a Justice Department lawsuit in 2010 taking aim at no-poaching agreements involving Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar and later Lucasfilm. The companies settled the case without admitting guilt or paying fines, but Adobe, Apple, Google and Intel paid $415 million to settle a subsequent class-action lawsuit.Since then, lawsuits have been filed across the industrial landscape. Pixar, Disney and Lucasfilm paid $100 million to settle an antitrust challenge to their agreements not to hire one another’s animation engineers. In 2019, 15 “cultural exchange” sponsors designated by the State Department paid $65.5 million to settle a lawsuit claiming, among other things, that they colluded to depress the wages of tens of thousands of au pairs on J-1 visas. Since 2019 Duke University and the University of North Carolina have paid nearly $75 million to settle two antitrust cases over agreements not to recruit each other’s faculty members.This month, Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission arguing that Planned Companies, one of the largest building services contractors in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, illegally forbids its clients to hire its janitors, concierges or security guards either directly or through another firm — locking its workers in.In perhaps the biggest case of all, in 2019 a class action was filed against the American chicken industry, growing to cover some 20 producers responsible for about 90 percent of the poultry market. The complaint accused them of exchanging detailed wage information to fix the wages of about a quarter-million employees, including hourly workers deboning chickens, refrigeration technicians and feed-mill supervisors on a salary.Four of the chicken processors have settled, agreeing to pay tens of millions of dollars. In February, Webber, Meng, Sahl & Company, one of two firms that collected wage data for the poultry companies, settled as well, offering a fairly clear window into the industry’s attempts to suppress wages.In a declaration to the court, part of the settlement agreement, the law firm’s president, Jonathan Meng, said the chicken companies had used the firm “as an unwitting tool to conceal their misconduct.” He offered details about how poultry executives would share detailed wage information. “They wanted to know how much and when their competitors were planning to increase salaries and salary ranges,” he said, because it would allow them “to limit and reduce their salary increases and salary range increases.”Most of the defendants, however, are still contesting the case. They have argued that to prove collusion, the plaintiffs must show that wages across the industry moved in tandem, an argument the court has yet to rule on.Another hurdle is convincing judges that chicken industry workers amount to a specific occupation. If workers deboning chickens could easily leave the poultry industry to work for a better wage at McDonald’s or 7-Eleven, they would have a tougher case to prove that anticompetitive practices by poultry processors caused them direct harm.In pursuing such cases, the government is likely to be challenged by corporate groups every step of the way.Mr. Heather at the Chamber of Commerce, for one, argues that “this narrative that lax antitrust is responsible for income inequality” is wrong. He notes a study sponsored by the chamber showing that corporate concentration is no higher than in 2002 and has been declining since 2007. “The heart of the premise is just flawed,” Mr. Heather said.Moreover, Mr. Heather said, labor markets are already covered by labor laws. “The chamber has an objection to the blending of antitrust and workplace regulation,” he said.Mr. Gidley of White & Case broadly agrees. “It is intriguing to us to see the last 40 years of antitrust law thrown out the window,” he said in an interview. “If antitrust is no longer about low prices but about a clean environment and wages and this, that and the other, it loses its compass.” More

Federal Reserve board member Christopher Waller said Wednesday that he expects interest rates to rise considerably over the next several months.
In a CNBC interview, Waller said current data on inflation and the general strength of the economy justify half-percentage-point increases ahead.
The Fed normally increases in 25-basis-point increments.

Getting inflation under control will require raising interest rates at a faster pace than normal even though the pace of price increases probably has peaked, Federal Reserve board member Christopher Waller said Wednesday.
That means the central bank likely will hike short-term rates by half a percentage point, or 50 basis points, at its meeting in May, and possibly follow it up with similar moves in the next several months, Waller told CNBC. The Fed normally increases in 25-basis-point increments. A basis point equals 0.01%.

“I think the data has come in exactly to support that step of policy action if the committee chooses to do so, and gives us the basis for doing it,” he said during a live “Closing Bell” interview with CNBC’s Sara Eisen. “I prefer a front-loading approach, so a 50-basis-point hike in May would be consistent with that, and possibly more in June and July.”
Markets already have almost fully priced that level of increase at next month’s Federal Open Market Committee meeting, as well as the following session in June, according to CME Group data that tracks moves in the fed funds futures market. Pricing for July also is tilting that way, with a 56.5% probability of another 50-basis-point hike.
That means that should the Fed choose to move aggressively, it won’t come as a surprise.
Waller said he thinks the central bank can pull off the tighter policy now because the economy is strong enough to support higher rates. The Fed is looking to raise rates to stave off inflation running at its highest levels in more than 40 years.
“I think we’re going to deal with inflation. We’ve laid out our plans,” he said. “We’re in a position where the economy’s strong, so this is a good time to do aggressive actions because the economy can take it.”

Nevertheless, there is some disagreement over how aggressive FOMC members want to be in the inflation battle.
In March, those favoring a quarter-percentage-point hike held just a tiny majority over those who wanted to double that. Officials through their public statements have offered differing views about how far the Fed should go, with Waller part of a group that wants rates to go past “neutral,” or the point where they are considered neither restrictive nor stimulative. The neutral funds rate now is considered to be around 2.5%.
On the other side of the debate, policymakers including Fed board member Lael Brainard and Chicago Fed President Charles Evans have said in recent days that they would rather get the rate to neutral and then assess what future actions may be needed.
“I think we want to get above neutral certainly by the latter half of the year, and we need to get closer to neutral as soon as possible,” Waller said.
St. Louis Fed President James Bullard told the Financial Times that it’s “fantasy” to think rates can go to neutral and still bring down inflation.
For his part, Waller said he is confident inflation will start coming down, even though the Fed’s powers are limited to control the lagging supply chains associated with the current round of higher prices.
“All we can do is kind of push down demand for these products and take some pressure off the prices that people have to pay for these products,” Waller said. “We can’t produce more wheat, we can’t produce more semiconductors, but we can affect the demand for these products in a way that puts downward pressure and takes some pressure off of inflation.”
Earlier in the day, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, a former Fed chair, said of the agency’s board members, “It’s their job to bring inflation down.”
“They have a dual mandate. They will try to maintain strong labor markets while bringing inflation down,” Yellen said during an appearance before the Atlantic Council. “And it has been done in the past. It’s not an impossible combination, but it will require skill and also good luck.”

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Christopher J. Waller, one of the Federal Reserve’s governors in Washington, said on Wednesday that recent economic data suggests that the central bank should raise interest rates by more than usual in May, and potentially in June and July as well.“The data has come in exactly to support that type of policy action, if the committee decides to do so,” Mr. Waller said during a CNBC interview on Wednesday, adding that the data may justify “possibly more in June and July.”Fed officials have coalesced around the need to “expeditiously” return policy to a neutral setting, one in which borrowing costs are neither stoking economic growth nor slowing it so much that unemployment rises, as inflation remains stubbornly rapid. Mr. Waller and other officials have made a case for making big rate increases to speed up the process, following the Fed’s decision to increase rates by a quarter of a percentage point in March.Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, has signaled that a large rate increase is up for debate, and minutes from the central bank’s last meeting showed that “many” officials would have favored a large increase in March if it hadn’t been for uncertainty created by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.Mr. Waller suggested that even though inflation might be touching a peak — data this week showed it rising at the fastest pace since 1981, as the war in Ukraine drove gas prices higher and exacerbated already-rapid price increases — it remained “very high,” and the Fed was going to need to keep working to reduce it.It is probably the case that “this is pretty much the peak — it’s going to start coming down,” Mr. Waller said, adding that he had forecast price increases slowing throughout the second part of the year as part of the economic projections he submitted at the Fed’s March meeting. “We’re already seeing some oil prices retreating back.”But Mr. Waller said it was critical to lift rates up to, and even above, neutral to bring down inflation.“Right now, our main concern is getting these prices down, and we can do that without causing a recession,” he said.Markets have heavily penciled in big rate increases in May and June, and investors had marked up the odds of a big move in July over recent weeks. More

In Britain, several pieces of dispiriting economic news arrived this week: Prices are rising at their fastest pace in 30 years, wages adjusted for inflation fell the most in nearly eight years and the economy hardly grew in February.It is mounting evidence of what is turning out to be a challenging year for many, with the tightest squeeze on household budgets forecast since records began in 1956.Even before Russia invaded Ukraine, Britain’s economic growth had slowed. But that war has weakened Britain’s economic outlook, as is the case in many countries. Rising energy costs are passing through to household bills. Manufacturers, farmers and supermarkets have warned about the rising cost of essential inputs into their supply chain from goods produced in Russia and Ukraine — including metals, wheat, fertilizer and sunflower oil. The pain is wide-reaching: Even fish and chips, a traditionally cheap British staple, has jumped in price.The Consumer Prices Index rose 7 percent in March from a year earlier, up from 6.2 percent the previous month, the Office for National Statistics said Wednesday. That exceeded economists’ predictions. Inflation was driven by record prices for gasoline and diesel, as well as by large increases at restaurants and hotels, for food and drinks, and clothing and furniture.This broad-based increase in prices for products that are usually seen as less volatile “will be viewed with particular discomfort by the Bank of England,” Sandra Horsfield, an economist at Investec, wrote in a note. The central bank has raised interest rates three times since December to their prepandemic level in an effort to arrest price increases, even as policymakers have cut the outlook for economic growth.The statistics agency also said on Wednesday that wholesale prices were rising at their fastest pace since September 2008. Output prices of manufacturers rose nearly 12 percent in March from a year earlier, while their input prices rose 19 percent, a record high.On Tuesday, data showed Britain’s unemployment rate fell to 3.8 percent, back to its prepandemic low, while there are a record number of job vacancies. Signs of a tight labor market are fueling expectations that workers will be in a position to demand larger salaries. Wages, excluding bonuses, in December to February rose 4 percent from a year earlier, but at the moment the gains are being eaten away by inflation. Once adjusted for price increases, pay fell 1 percent, the most since mid-2014.The British economy has recovered from its pandemic slump, but growth is waning. After the Omicron wave subsided in February, bookings for accommodation and travel services increased, offering the main contributor to economic growth that month. The economy grew just 0.1 percent, as manufacturing of cars, electrical products and chemicals all declined, the statistics agency said on Monday. More

The producer price index, which measures prices paid by wholesalers, rose 1.4% in March and 11.2% from a year ago, both records for data going back to 2010.
Prices for final demand goods led with a 2.3% monthly rise, while services prices gained 0.9%.
Wednesday’s release comes the day after the BLS reported the consumer price index for March surged 8.5% over the past year.

The prices that goods and services producers receive rose in March at the fastest pace since records have been kept, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Wednesday.
The producer price index, which measures the prices paid by wholesalers, increased 11.2% from a year ago, the most in a data series going back to November 2010. On a monthly basis, the gauge climbed 1.4%, above the 1.1% Dow Jones estimate and also a record.

Stripping out food, energy and trade services, so-called core PPI rose 0.9% on a monthly basis, nearly double the 0.5% estimate and the biggest monthly gain since January 2021. Core PPI increased 7% on a year-over-year basis.
PPI is considered a forward-looking inflation measure as it tracks prices in the pipeline for goods and services that eventually reach consumers.
Wednesday’s release comes the day after the BLS reported that the consumer price index for March surged 8.5% over the past year, above expectations and the highest reading since December 1981.
On the producer side, prices for final demand goods led with a 2.3% monthly rise, while services prices gained 0.9%, up sharply from the 0.3% February increase. Goods inflation has outstripped services during the Covid pandemic, but March’s numbers indicate that services are now catching up as consumer demand shifts.
Energy prices were the biggest gainer for the month, rising 5.7%, while food costs increased 2.4%.

Swelling inflation has prompted the Federal Reserve to begin tightening monetary policy.
In March, the Fed increased its benchmark short-term borrowing rate by 0.25 percentage point as the first step in what is expected to be a series of hikes through the year. Markets are pricing in an almost certainty that the central bank will double that move at its May meeting, and will keep going until the fed funds rate hits about 2.5% by the end of the year.
Markets initially showed no reaction to the PPI news, with stock market futures hovering around flat and Treasury yields also little changed.

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Gasoline weighed heavily in the increases, while prices moderated in several categories. Some economists say the overall rate may have peaked.Inflation hit 8.5 percent in the United States last month, the fastest 12-month pace since 1981, as a surge in gasoline prices tied to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine added to sharp increases coming from the collision of strong demand and stubborn pandemic-related supply shortages.Fuel prices jumped to record levels across much of the nation and grocery costs soared, the Labor Department said Tuesday in its monthly report on the Consumer Price Index. The price pressures have been painful for American households, especially those that have lower incomes and devote a big share of their budgets to necessities.But the news was not uniformly bad: A measure that strips out volatile food and fuel prices decelerated slightly from February as used car prices swooned. Economists and policymakers took that as a sign that inflation in goods might be starting to cool off after climbing at a breakneck pace for much of the past year.In fact, several economists said March may be a high-water mark for overall inflation. Price increases could begin abating in the coming months in part because gasoline prices have declined somewhat — the national average for a gallon was $4.10 on Tuesday, according to AAA, down from a $4.33 peak in March. Some researchers also expect consumers to stop buying so many goods, whether furniture or outdoor equipment, which could begin to take pressure off overtaxed supply chains.“These numbers are likely to represent something of a peak,” said Gregory Daco, the chief economist at Ernst & Young’s strategy consultancy, EY-Parthenon. Still, he said, it will be crucial to watch whether price increases excluding food and fuel — so-called core prices — slow down in the months ahead.A letup would be welcome news for the White House, because inflation has become a major liability for Democrats as midterm elections approach in November. Public confidence in the economy has fallen sharply, and as rapid price increases undermine support for President Biden and his party, they could imperil their control of Congress.Inflation Rates Around the World More

WASHINGTON — President Biden announced on Tuesday a plan to suspend a ban on summertime sales of higher-ethanol gasoline blends, a move that White House officials said was aimed at reducing gas prices but that energy experts predicted would have only a marginal impact at the pump.The Environmental Protection Agency will issue a waiver that would allow the blend known as E15 — which is made of 15 percent ethanol — to be used between June 1 and Sept. 15. The White House estimated that approximately 2,300 stations in the country offer the blend and cast the decision as a move toward “energy independence.”“E15 is about 10 cents a gallon cheaper,” Mr. Biden said, speaking after taking a tour of a production facility that produces 150 million gallons of bioethanol annually. “And some gas stations offer an even bigger discount than that.”“When you have a choice, you have competition,” Mr. Biden added. “When you have competition, you have better prices.”The decision to lift the summertime ban comes as Mr. Biden faces growing pressure to bring down energy prices, which helped drive the fastest rate of inflation since 1981 in March. A gallon of gas was averaging $4.10 on Tuesday, according to AAA. Last month, the president announced a plan to release one million barrels of oil a day from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve over the next six months.Understand Inflation in the U.S.Inflation 101: What is inflation, why is it up and whom does it hurt? Our guide explains it all.Your Questions, Answered: Times readers sent us their questions about rising prices. Top experts and economists weighed in.Interest Rates: As it seeks to curb inflation, the Federal Reserve announced that it was raising interest rates for the first time since 2018.How Americans Feel: We asked 2,200 people where they’ve noticed inflation. Many mentioned basic necessities, like food and gas.Supply Chain’s Role: A key factor in rising inflation is the continuing turmoil in the global supply chain. Here’s how the crisis unfolded.Ethanol is made from corn and other crops and has been mixed into some types of gasoline for years as a way to reduce reliance on oil. But the blend’s higher volatility can contribute to smog in warmer weather. For that reason, environmental groups have traditionally objected to lifting the summertime ban, as have oil companies, which fear greater use of ethanol will cut into their sales.How much the presence of ethanol holds down fuel prices has been a subject of debate among economists. Some experts said the decision was likely to reap larger political benefits than financial ones.“This is still very very small compared with the strategic petroleum reserve release,” said David Victor, a climate policy expert at the University of California, San Diego. “This one is much more of a transparently political move.”Lawmakers in corn-producing states have been urging Mr. Biden to use biofuels to fill the gap created by the United States ban on importing Russian oil. Oil refiners are required to blend some ethanol into gasoline under a pair of laws, passed in 2005 and 2007, intended to reduce the use of oil and the creation of greenhouse gases by mandating increased levels of ethanol in the nation’s fuel mix every year. However, since passage of the 2007 law, the mandate has been met with criticism that it has contributed to increased fuel prices and has done little to reduce greenhouse gas pollution.Inflation F.A.Q.Card 1 of 6What is inflation? More

Employees of a nonunion production are seeking improved compensation and safety protocols, saying a union version of the same musical pays better.A group of actors and stage managers employed by a nonunion touring production of the musical “Waitress” is seeking union representation, emboldened by a growing focus on working conditions in the theater business and by the labor movement’s recent successes in other industries.Actors’ Equity Association, a labor union representing 51,000 performers and stage managers, said it had collected signatures from more than the 30 percent of workers required to seek an election, and that on Tuesday it had submitted an election petition to the National Labor Relations Board, which conducts such elections.The number of people affected is small — there are 22 actors and stage managers employed by the tour, according to Equity — but the move is significant because it is the first time Equity has tried to organize a nonunion tour since an unsuccessful effort two decades ago to unionize a touring production of “The Music Man.” (The union also sought a boycott of that production.)Union officials said the “Waitress” tour was an obvious place for an organizing campaign because of an unusually clear comparison: There are currently two touring companies of that musical, one of which is represented by the union and one of which is not. The workers in the nonunion tour are being paid about one-third of what the workers in the union company are making, and have lesser safety protections, Equity said. (The minimum union actor salary is $2,244 per week.)“We thought it was not right and not fair, so we approached them to see if they were interested in us representing them,” said Stefanie Frey, the union’s director of organizing and mobilization. Frey said that the productions were so similar that some of the nonunion performers have been asked to teach performers in the union production, and that some have moved from the nonunion production to the union production. “It’s an obvious group of people getting exploited,” she said.Jennifer Ardizzone-West, the chief operating officer at NETworks Presentations, the company that is producing the nonunion “Waitress” tour, declined to offer an immediate reaction, saying, “Until we see the actual filing, it is premature for me to comment.”Tours are an important, and lucrative, part of the Broadway economy. During the 2018-19 theater season — the last full season before the pandemic — unionized touring shows grossed $1.6 billion and were attended by 18.5 million people, according to the Broadway League. Similar statistics are not readily available for nonunion tours, but Frey said, “The nonunion tour world has grown over the last 15 years.”Equity is in the process of hiring two additional organizers as it seeks to expand its efforts, according to a union spokesman, David Levy, who noted recent successful efforts to organize some employees at REI, Starbucks and Amazon. The National Labor Relations Board said last week that the number of union election petitions has been increasing dramatically.Frey said the long pandemic shutdown of theaters had also contributed to a new interest in organizing in the theater industry. “Workers are feeling a little bit more of their power and want to fight for what they deserve in a different way,” she said. More