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What Trade Associations and Chambers of Commerce Can Do For Their Members

Email This Section to Interested Businesses, Associates, Friends or Relatives

Members of trade associations and the small business members of local chambers of commerce are not as sophisticated, generally, as the people running their trade association or chamber of commerce. The owners of small business have enough trouble trying to remain in business without having to learn as much as they should know about federal antitrust laws, litigation, websites of help to small businesses, and reading about various solutions for the problems of small businesses.

I have spent a lifetime helping small businesses, and things are never getting any better, or so it seems to me. The problems of small business are getting worse and worse, and seem to get worse in indirect proportion to the size of their competitors and size of the American debt. The debt increases because the large corporations take the money, representing the taxes paid largely by small businesses and their owners, and the large corporations get larger and larger, and are able to accomplish things with the press, legislators, elected officials, the public, universities and otherwise making it more difficult for small businesses to compete. A recent event was the enactment of a federal statute that requires class actions of an interstate nature to be brought in federal court, for the announced purpose of having the federal judges be more likely to dismiss the action. This would be true especially if the class action were for a group of small business plaintiffs. The new statute is called "The Class Action Fairness Act of 2005 - Detailed Analysis by Greenberg Traurig LLP of the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005

What you can do if you are an official of a trade association or local chamber of commerce is to become familiar with this website on a workable way that small businesses in your area can obtain antitrust relief that otherwise they would never get. The town and its residents would be much better off if the local businesses can enforce the nation's antitrust laws designed to protect small businesses. The idea getting tossed around that the Robinson-Patman Act is dated and should be repealed is pure nonsense. The major corporations and their hirelings would like to eliminate any law that attempts to regulate big business, so that big business can do anything it wants to do (which of course it seems they are pretty much able to do right now).

The big-business opponents (and their apologists and paid consultants) like to argue that the Robinson-Patman Act is outdated because it results in higher prices to the public. The United States Supreme Court up to this writing has been suckered into believing that price is everything, and that anything that would tend to increase the price of a product is anti-competitive and bad. It is partly for this reason that antitrust law has not been able to stop outsourcing of jobs to other countries. The doctrine of lowest price was developed at a time when there was no significant outsourcing, and that lowest price meant that a job in high-priced New York could go to lower-priced southern states, with the result in the United States economic system that Americans got lower-priced goods, even if jobs in New York went to South Carolina, for example.

Now, the fallacy of this doctrine becomes readily apparent when realizing that sending all of our jobs to foreign countries would wind up (temporarily) with lower prices in the United States, but in short order there would be no income with which to buy the lower-priced products. No, what America needs is jobs locally at higher prices per hour than paid in other countries so that American workers can pay their mortgages, buy food, get health care, dental care and clothing, and higher education, almost none of which could be obtained at American prices with wages paid in India or China. Thus, it is perfectly clear to me that the doctrine of lowest price is everything is a disastrous doctrine in need of review and change if this nation is to survive. The background of new Supreme Court appointees is very important because major corporations will benefit if the Supreme Court continues to rule that low price is everything, and this will mean the continuing loss of your jobs and opportunity in America, with resulting transfer of your wealth, and the Wealth of America, to the major corporations of the world, some of which we used to think of as "American". But no longer. They do not have any recognized responsibility for America or Americans, only to the peso, yen, rupee or other foreign currency on their way to destroying the economies of as many countries as are dumb enough to let them.

Your members need you to tell them about how they can resist the illegal activities resulting in illegally-low prices when their major-retailer competitors buy goods from the large manufacturers, with the result that the major retailers are able to offer the lowest prices to the public. These major retailers are not more efficient. They are buying their goods at prices which are as low as one-half as much as the per unit price paid by the small members of your organization (if they buy directly) or one-half as much as the per unit price paid by the wholesalers selling to your small- business members.

The remedy for this is to bring a lawsuit against the manufacturer, something that any direct or indirect purchaser could do, but which a direct purchaser is unlikely to do because the direct purchaser doesn't want to sue its supplier. Thus, the lowly indirect purchaser has an opportunity to obtain some extra income by commencing a lawsuit under Sections 2(d)/2(e) of the Robinson- Patman Act for failure by the manufacturer to provide to the indirect purchaser the same advertising and promotional program payments or services that the manufacturer is providing to the direct-purchasing major retailer.

This type of lawsuit could wind up with your member obtaining anywhere from $100,000 up to a million dollars of recovery or more, depending of course on the extent of the manufacturers' discriminatory payments and services to the member's major-retailer competitor.

Your members, your member's family, your town and its residents, and YES your organization needs to have financially-stronger members and here is your chance to do something to make this happen. Send out a notice to all of your members about the availability of useful information in this website for retailers, jobbers or wholesalers who are paying too much for the goods they are buying. They can get a refund, trebled, of the damages to their businesses caused by the manufacturer's overcharges. I'm suggesting, loosely, that by not getting the advertising and promotional moneys and services, they are in effect paying more for their goods than their competitors. But this is only as to advertising and promotional money and services given on a discriminatory basis to the nation's major retailers. The lower per-unit prices they are also receiving is another story, and this is covered by the Section 2(a)/2(f) action. See my Robinson- Patman Act website for a full discussion on this other type of RPA action, at Robinson-Patman Act Website.