“It’s good business to be a monopoly, and that brings with it social and political power, but there’s a huge backlash to that because people just don’t think that’s legitimate,” said Matt Stoller, the American Economic Liberties Project’s director of research and author of Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy.

Stoller spoke in a fireside chat at From Day One’s Washington, D.C. conference, where he was interviewed by Nick Baily, From Day One’s co-founder and CEO, about the relationship between business and government, the subject of his book, and how this relationship affects the HR discipline.

“There’s a sense that the way things are today is just kind of the way things are, that the forces at work and the economy and business are inevitable, that they can’t be stopped,” Baily asserted.

Nothing is unchangeable, of course, and Stoller was there to provide context about how the relationship between government, business, and workers has changed, and will continue to do so. What makes working in HR in the U.S. so difficult is that corporations, not workers, wield most of the power. HR teams are expected to operate somewhere in the middle, administering equity that they don’t necessarily have the power to dole out, says Stoller.

Stoller’s argument is that policy decisions have steadily taken power from workers and given it to corporations. “Everything from missiles and munitions to peanut butter to search engines. It’s all been more consolidated,” he said. “The consequence is that people have less opportunity to start a business, they have less power, they have less ability to leave a job.”

From your high school U.S. history class, you may remember studying the trusts and trustbusters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As corporations swelled, the government responded with antitrust legislation meant to curb their power.

But since the 1970s, the government has handed the reins back to business. “Prior to the 1970s, there was a sense that big is bad. If you’re a big corporation, we’re going to keep an eye on you,” Stoller said. “After the 1970s, they said ‘We don’t care if you’re big, we just want you to be efficient with low prices.’”

Corporate power over workers comes in many forms, like non-competes, no-poach agreements, non-disclosure agreements, and the like–what Stoller calls “coercive contracts.” “There’s more ability to exert control over workers, there’s less ability for workers to have a voice in the work that they do,” he said. One consequence, among many, is inequality.

It was HR departments that were called upon to operationalize the landmark civil rights laws passed in the 1960s and 1970s. “HR looks like a civil rights movement when workers have no power,” he said.

This way of doing things is not sustainable, says Stoller, but it does explain why good HR can feel like such a slog. “When you’re trying to create these democratizing ideas, like diversity, equity and inclusion, the basic idea behind that is everybody should be equal. How do you do that in an environment where workers basically don’t have power?”

Stoller made it clear that he wasn’t there to dispense advice to HR professionals about how to do their jobs, but to validate their frustrations–“to give you some context for why some of the problems you’re dealing with are so insoluble, because there is this inconsistency in how people think about power today,” he said.

As in the era of the trustbuster, we’re due for a reaction to the consolidation of power. This time, it’s coming from the people as well as the Biden administration in pushing back against blockbuster mergers. We’re witnessing a labor movement that is winning equal pay, paid leave, flexible work arrangements, and remote work. There is also renewed interest in workers’ rights, and the unionization movement is accelerating.

Stoller recommended a change to the larger collective conscience. “We have to stop thinking about ourselves as consumers,” he said, “and start thinking about ourselves as citizens, and think about democracy and empowering ordinary people to make decisions about their lives, the work that they do, and their communities.”

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance writer based in Richmond, Va. She writes about the workplace, DEI, hiring, and women’s experiences at work. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Fast Company, and Food Technology, among others.