Silicon Valley workers may pursue collusion case as group

The issue is not whether the collusion is public or private, and it is also not whether it benefits the rich or the poor.

The issue is that in general it is illegal to reduce competition by forming a cartel. People to it privately because it is illegal. The one exception for this is forming a cartel of sellers of labor, i.e. a union. Note that, if it were not a labor union, a cartel would be illegal even if it was benefiting poor people at the expense or big corporations.

A much better reason for allowing labor unions, is that unless they use physical force (which of course they do, all the time, but I am speaking theoretically here), they don't really create that much market power. People can always choose to work during a strike (again, assuming the union doesn't physically stop them, which is in theory illegal). If unions don't create market power, what is the point of them? I think they can be useful to help management to stick to long-term commitments they make to workers, and to provide an alternate way for workers to be represented in the company.

> I said this law is right.

Here are your words: "Collusion is [...] not bad unless it's illegal, and what we've decided in the US is [...]". Looking at this, and the rest of the comment, I can see that:

1. You can imagine US collusion law being in a state other than what it is ("what we've decided in the US is [...]").

2. The only argument you present is that the conduct described is illegal.

3. You specifically acknowledge that in some sense, the fact that the conduct described is illegal is a coincidence (in modal logic, it is not a necessary truth); it's how the US decided to handle the law.

As the existence of the law is the only argument you presented for the badness of the conduct, I conclude that you are arguing that the conduct is bad because the law prohibits it.

The alternative, that you are asserting with no justification that the conduct is bad, and also remarking, apropos of nothing, that the law prohibits it, violates Grice's maxim of relevance. It also violates the structure of what you said, which was a quite clear statement that if the law does not prohibit collusion, that collusion cannot be bad.

I will happily license you to restrict my comment to the domain of collusion; I'm willing to believe that you did not intend your audience to infer "assassination is not bad unless it's illegal" from "collusion is not bad unless it's illegal". But we are discussing collusion, and everything I said applies there. The example I picked, antitrust law, is specifically related to it, and is even specifically the main topic of the post. So: if the US repealed all its antitrust laws, can I assume you would agree that any collusion formerly prohibited by them was now unobjectionable? If not, would you like to revise your comment?

Finally:

> Your disagreement on semantics is just plain wrong.

Compare to my comment, "I have to agree with the bare semantics here".

> If the law they broke is a "conspiracy" law, then the fundamental difference between what these companies did and what a union does is the "secret" part of a conspiracy.

There is no blanket "conspiracy" law in the US; it would violate the freedom of assembly. For conspiracy to be criminal conduct, the object of the conspiracy needs to be illegal. Therefore, the fundamental difference, as I pointed out before, is not that the companies acted secretly and unions act in the open. If the companies acted in the open, that would still be illegal. The question you're dismissing is, why?

(E.g.) A Google employee sends his/her resume to Apple, then Apple tells Google that said employee is looking for work elsewhere.