Professional people generally belong to organizations that represent their interests For example, physicians in the United States belong to the American Medical Association (AMA), and lawyers belong to the American Bar Association (ABA) Both organizations work vigorously to advance the economic interests of their members Professional organizations often lobby for legislation that protects their members They may seek to restrict competition by limiting the number of individuals who can be licensed to practice a particular profession The AMA has been very successful in limiting the number of physicians, thus maintaining higher salaries than would otherwise exist The ABA has fought legal reforms aimed at limiting awards to plaintiffs who win damage suits; such reforms would be likely to reduce the incomes of lawyers Producers’ Cooperatives Independent producers sometimes band together into a cooperative for the purpose of selling their products The cooperative sets the price and assigns production quotas to individual firms In effect, a cooperative acts as a legal cartel Because they violate the provisions of laws that outlaw such arrangements in most industries, producers’ cooperatives must be authorized by Congress Farmers have sometimes been given such rights when they are confronted by monopsony buyers For example, Congress granted dairy farmers the right to form cooperatives in the 1920s because they faced monopsony buyers High transportation costs for fresh milk, together with economies of scale in processing milk, generally left only one dairy Attributed to Libby Rittenberg and Timothy Tregarthen Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/books/ Saylor.org 769