Confederación Hípica v. Confederación de Jinetes Puertorriqueños

Abstract

The statutory labor dispute exemption, which shields labor organizing from antitrust scrutiny, has long been though to apply only to legal employees. But in April of this year the First Circuit held that a group of Puerto Rican Jockeys, who went on strike to protest the terms and conditions under which they were hired by the horse and racetrack owners, were entitled to the exemption irrespective of their alleged status as independent contractors, because theirs was a dispute over wages. In this comment on Jinetes, 30 F.4th 306 (1st Cir. 2022), I summarize the pre-Jinetes labor dispute exemption doctrine and the First Circuit's holding, and argue that the wages/prices distinction it relied on must be interpreted in light of the New Deal scheme of labor regulation, which emphasized the need for workers to join together against concentrations of capital.