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How Apple, Google, and other tech companies conspired against their own workers

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Re: How Apple, Google, and other tech companies conspired against their own workers

#181

Post by hammock »

FireBeyond wrote: post #111
defen wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So while this is bad... I don't know how to feel about this. Just to be clear: you are saying it's possibly ok for a cartel of billionaires to collude to suppress wages for a bunch of people making six figures? Because those employees have it "pretty good" and should be happy with what they're given, even though they are working to build world-historical fortunes and power for the business owners?

Exactly. I don't think people really understand the gravity of those fortunes. Jeff Bezos could now (in theory, at market prices) buy Tacoma, Washington. As in buy every piece of real estate, private and public, all utilities and infrastructure. A town of 200,000 people. One man could buy it all. The assessed property value for 2017 was just over $105B, including government-owned, plus wiggle room for other propertie…

That makes his wealth seem pretty small, to me.

Re: How Apple, Google, and other tech companies conspired against their own workers

#182

Post by khalilravanna »

tbarbugli wrote: post #136

> estimated $3 billion in lost wages. Before the case went to trial, the companies settled for a total of $435 million So you get busted doing something illegal and walk away with a 2.5Billion in your pocket and 0 jail time. How do you expect execs to not do this all the time?

If the number of 64,000 employees is correct, even that $3B seems like a pittance. One commenter wrote their wage jumped by $100k the year after this settlement. $3B / 64k ~= $50k per person, less than half that number[1]. In the end they only had to pay an amount that was My guess is the executives who orchestrated this got a big bonus as a result. And why wouldn't they? They optimized for the corporation's good. How do we collectively start incentivizing not being evil like this?

1. Sure it's only one data point to extrapolate off of but anecdotally hearing that people were paid $100-150k in SF while this was going on is a substantial amount of wage suppression given that those same people employed now would be making $300-500k at those same companies without blinking an eye.

Re: How Apple, Google, and other tech companies conspired against their own workers

#183

Post by thfuran »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #164
munk-a wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, there is far too much ability to transfer liability in the modern world which lets this sort of stuff get abstract and easier to dismiss. Companies should be held accountable to the extent their growth has encouraged bad behavior, but individuals at that company committed the behavior and, if they were instructed to do so and blindly followed then... 1. "Just following orders" isn't now and has never been a…

In a frictionless system, sure. When lawyers cost so much, this kind of chain-of-lawsuits system would be a huge payout to lawyers.

It'd be nice if the people adversely affected by malfeasance got compensation, but the more important part, as far as utility goes, is that the perpetrators suffer significant penalty to disincentivize the behavior.

Re: How Apple, Google, and other tech companies conspired against their own workers

#184

Post by defen »

keepper wrote: post #145
defen wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So while this is bad... I don't know how to feel about this. Just to be clear: you are saying it's possibly ok for a cartel of billionaires to collude to suppress wages for a bunch of people making six figures? Because those employees have it "pretty good" and should be happy with what they're given, even though they are working to build world-historical fortunes and power for the business owners?

No, being clear, since it seems you aren't separating concepts. You're not happy that these companies have SINGLE large shareholders. That the founders kept so much company equity. I FULLY AGREE no one should have that much wealth. But, no one here is complaining about families or others having similar wealth. They are complaining that founders kept that much ownership. The real wage suppression is happening in other…

I agree with what you've said, but there's not much that individuals on here can do about it. I'm just trying to convince readers here not to willingly participate in reducing their own wages for the benefit of insanely rich business owners.

Re: How Apple, Google, and other tech companies conspired against their own workers

#186

Post by zaphirplane »

GeekyBear wrote: post #154
rtkwe wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the main part that they were given legal guidance that what they were doing was not legally torture though? There's a bit in another article that got posted today [0] about that. > Guantánamo leadership wanted to understand the legal gymnastics that would be required to implement a program of their own. “Torture has been prohibited by international law, but the language of the statutes is written vaguely,” and…

People weren't just tortured, some were tortured to death. The United States Senate ratified, and President Reagan signed the The U.N. Convention Against Torture, which states that “no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.” No amount of legal hand waving by the Bush ad…

Not arguing the moral point. The parent poster said the threshold of the treatment becoming torture wasn’t crossed, you are saying torture is banned by the agreement. It needs to be torture for you point to have standing

Re: How Apple, Google, and other tech companies conspired against their own workers

#187

Post by nostrademons »

pathseeker wrote: post #153
nostrademons wrote: post #122

So I was at one of these companies when the scandal broke. I didn't get screwed quite so much as my coworkers, since I'd only been working there for a year or so. The settlement was a joke - I got about $1100, but my compensation increased by roughly $100K/year the year after the cartel broke, and kept rising. Can't say I'm terribly pleased about either the wage-fixing or the settlement, but... My wife works in phila…

>So now house prices in Mountain View and Sunnyvale go from $800K -> $2.4M, This just proves that the housing crises was the same before. A regular middle-class income cannot afford an $800k home. The problem is the same before and after: there isn't enough supply for people who want homes. Until you look at sales numbers and supply, your analysis is meaningless. Increased wages don't make housing prices increase. >n…

I don't deny that the root cause of this issue is lack of supply. I'm saying that over short time periods (and sometimes over long ones where NIMBY policies rule), lack of housing supply is a given, and so the consequence of more money for housing is not more housing, it's higher housing prices.

1% of the population being flush with cash has virtually no effect on a housing market where 5% of the housing stock turns over every year. It has a very large effect when Realistically, if these big tech companies offered full remote work (which they actually do, if you've been at the company long enough, but a relatively small portion of the employees meet the tenure & job performance requirements), you wouldn't get 10,000 remote employees in Detroit. You'd get 100,000 remote employees who are free to move around the U.S. to whichever city they prefer most. It's highly likely they will clump in cities that are desirable for techies - Seattle, Portland, Boulder, Austin, Boston, NYC, Pittsburgh, Raleigh-Durham. All except the last 2 are already getting their own version of a mini-housing-crisis, but not to the extent that the Bay Area is.

Re: How Apple, Google, and other tech companies conspired against their own workers

#188

Post by zaphirplane »

mtgx wrote: post #49
crowdpleaser wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Just following orders" was a valid excuse until the Nuremberg trials.

You don't think people were executed post-war for "just following orders" before the Nuremberg trials? In other words, do you really think such people got off easy before the Nuremberg trials? If anything, much worse has happened to them throughout history, because the kings and dictators didn't have to put them through a judicial process.

Of course they were. The key point is the Nuremberg trials are legal trials, supposedly fair and Geneva convention friendly way to punish the loosing side one Japan escaped

Re: How Apple, Google, and other tech companies conspired against their own workers

#189

Post by GeekyBear »

zaphirplane wrote: post #186
GeekyBear wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People weren't just tortured, some were tortured to death. The United States Senate ratified, and President Reagan signed the The U.N. Convention Against Torture, which states that “no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.” No amount of legal hand waving by the Bush ad…

Not arguing the moral point. The parent poster said the threshold of the treatment becoming torture wasn’t crossed, you are saying torture is banned by the agreement. It needs to be torture for you point to have standing

How can the treatment of prisoners prove to be fatal without that treatment rising to the level of torture?

As Obama put it, "We tortured some folks."

He just refused to prosecute those guilty of ordering and carrying out that torture, despite our treaty obligation to do so.

Re: How Apple, Google, and other tech companies conspired against their own workers

#190

Post by dcosson »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #161
pertymcpert wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just exposed and accelerated an underlying issue in housing policy. When demand goes up supply is also supposed to go up to meet demand in a healthy market, but because of artificial supply restrictions this is what happened. The government is to blame.

New housing development plans in the Valley, especially plans for higher-density developments, suffer from zoning restrictions arising out of “NIMBY” attitudes at the local level. However, I don’t think that’s the state or federal government’s responsibility to change. If American government is truly to be “of the people, by the people”, then the people’s decisions at the local government level ought to be respected,…

I don’t see why there’s anything inherently better with having this happen at the local level vs the state level. If a majority of Californian voters have elected state legislators who will vote for these policies at the state level, that’s just as valid, and still a completely democratic, path towards change as having it happen city by city.
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