The Licensing Racket
How We Decide Who Is Allowed to Work, and Why It Goes Wrong
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- $35.99
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- $35.99
Publisher Description
A bottom-up investigation of the broken system of professional licensing, affecting everyone from hairdressers and morticians to doctors, lawyers, real estate agents, and those who rely on their services.
Tens of millions of US workers are required by law to have a license to do their jobs—about twice as many as are in unions. The requirements are set by over 1,500 industry-specific licensing boards, staffed mainly by volunteers from the industries they regulate. These boards have enormous power to shape the economy and the lives of individuals. As consumers, we rely on licensing boards to maintain standards of hygiene, skill, and ethics. But their decisions can be maddeningly arbitrary, creating unnecessary barriers to work. And where boards could be useful, curbing harms and ensuring professionalism, their performance is profoundly disappointing.
When Rebecca Haw Allensworth began attending board meetings, she discovered a thicket of self-dealing and ineptitude. Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews with board members and applicants, The Licensing Racket goes behind the scenes to show how boards protect insiders from competition and turn a blind eye to unethical behavior. Even where there is the will to discipline bad actors, boards lack the resources needed to investigate serious cases. The consequences range from the infuriatingly banal—a hairdresser prevented from working—to the deeply shocking, with medical licensing boards bearing considerable blame for the opioid crisis and for staffing shortages during the COVID epidemic. Meanwhile, unethical lawyers who are allowed to keep their licenses are overrepresented among advocates working with the most vulnerable groups in society.
If licensing is in many arenas a pointless obstacle to employment, in others it is as important as it is ineffective. Allensworth argues for abolition where appropriate and outlines an agenda for reform where it is most needed.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
America's professional licensing system drives up prices, lowers employment, and fails to protect consumers, according to this hard-hitting debut study. Allensworth, a law professor at Vanderbilt University, concedes that "licensing makes sense when a job is dangerous and requires professional judgment," such as in law or medicine, but she suggests that laws mandating auctioneers and florists to acquire licenses is overkill. Decrying the sometimes overzealous credentialing standards imposed by state licensing boards, Allensworth recounts how a Tennessee hair braider accrued thousands of dollars in fines and endured frequent raids on her salon because she lacked the 300 hours of classroom instruction required for a cosmetology license. Worse, many licensing boards are woefully inept at preventing misconduct, Allensworth argues, citing case after case of doctors and lawyers whose licenses were restored by complacent medical boards and bar associations after they were convicted of drug dealing, theft, or sexual assault. The author's commonsense recommendations include abolishing licensing for many trades and regulating the remaining licensed professions with state agencies, which Allensworth asserts are better positioned to avoid the conflicts of interest that arise from practitioners overseeing their own profession. Filled with lucid analysis that cuts through the thicket of legal and economic issues, this is a persuasive critique of a pressing regulatory matter.
