They didn't say they wouldn't hire each other's employees, just they wouldn't actively recruit top talent from each other. I don't see what's wrong with that. Top employees can still apply on their own.
Silicon Valley workers may pursue collusion case as group
51–60 of 94 posts
Re: Silicon Valley workers may pursue collusion case as group
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are many, many problems here. > Collusion is also not bad unless it's illegal Did it ever occur to you that laws might be passed despite those same laws not being beneficial? In your model of the world, where legal actions are all, by definition, good, how would legislators decide whether or not to enact a prospective law? If we repealed all our antitrust legislation, can I assume you would agree that employer…
Oooh boy, I get to PG you and point you at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man as my answer for your first comment. Breaks down like this: I said this law is right. You then say I'm saying all laws are by definition good and then attack that restatement of my position, which isn't what I said. Your disagreement on semantics is just plain wrong. If the law they broke is a "conspiracy" law, then the fundamental diff…
If Wikipedia is to be believed, a conspiracy doesn't require secrecy: "Conspiracy has been defined in the US as an agreement of two or more people to commit a crime... A conspiracy does not need to have been planned in secret to meet the definition of the crime." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_%28crime%29#United_...)
Re: Silicon Valley workers may pursue collusion case as group
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
I honestly don't know how to respond to this. Here are some of my thoughts. > 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 y…
Jesus Christ. Just stop posting.
Instead of lowering SNR with a rude comment, just stop reading.
Re: Silicon Valley workers may pursue collusion case as group
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only people who don't understand that wages come from the value a person produces. Lawyers, doctors, professional athletes, also get high wages and are entitled to them. If you want to adjust income inequality you have to do it across the board, through taxation, not by shaming individual industries. We get paid so much because we produce that much value. But if these allegations are true, we aren't getting paid enou…
So... what do you think about the salaries of teachers in public schools? Also, I bet bank & oil execs believe they make the world-go-round and add a lot of value too. After all, banks & oil touches pretty much all our lives as much as computers do, right?
Paying teachers more won't magically make them better teachers. I have been told by experts that there is strong evidence that better teachers achieve better results for students. From this it follows that if there were a way to identify potentially good teachers, it would make sense to attract these people by offering higher salaries.
But that would involve hiring different people (who would probably demand higher salaries), not paying existing teachers more.
The fact is that some people are more valuable than others. Not in an existential sense, but in the sense of how much their labor is worth the market.
Senior management are a special case. I think many of them are people with exceptional ability, but it is harder to argue that their wages are "market wages" because they tend to determine their own salaries. There are many market frictions that are particular to the shareholder-manager relationship. These might potentially allow senior management to extract "economic rent" i.e. wages that are beyond the value they produce.
Re: Silicon Valley workers may pursue collusion case as group
#55(google employee here)
One thing I have always wondered is if the raises Google employees received in 2011 were a result of the illegal collusion being uncovered and therefore no longer depressing salaries. The timing seems about right.
For reference: http://www.businessinsider.com/google-bonus-and-raise-2010-1...
(It was much more than 10% by the way, and by far the biggest raise I've ever received in my career)
It's beyond dispute that the raises were given for competitive reasons. (No, we didn't all get a raise because we were doing such a great job.) There was an uptick in Googlers leaving.
I suppose some of it had to do with Facebook, which was NOT part of the collusion. But I wonder how related the two events are, and if this issue will come up in a future class action lawsuit.
It's a pretty unprecedented event to give all employees at an enormous company such a big raise. A sudden shift in the job market caused by this defunct agreement could explain it.
Re: Silicon Valley workers may pursue collusion case as group
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting examples. Doctors are part of a cartel. Also lawyers. Although I don't think all lawyers get high wages. Professional athletes are unionized. They would be earning much less money if they weren't.
yeah it's hard to find examples of high wage workers who aren't in some sense unionized. Not really sure what your point is though. After all, if their wages are in part due to being part of a cartel, then tech workers who earn that wage without a cartel are even more deserving of it.
Ok, first you write that "wages come from the value a person produces."
Then you write "it's hard to find examples of high wage workers who aren't in some sense unionized."
And then you again add something completely contradictory.
But I do agree with you. I would say that tech workers are underpaid. Google has revenue per employee of $931,565. Most of that is profit. Is the average compensation per Googler anywhere near that?
Why shouldn't Googlers form a union and take lets say an average $500,000 per employee? Right now, Googlers get paid free-market wages that are a fraction of the value they add to the company.
Re: Silicon Valley workers may pursue collusion case as group
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, if you believe that you can reduce any use of a word down to its most abstract concept giving you the ability to equate anything to anything else. By those standards collusion is also a tomato, a pair of shoes, and my left ear. Very Zen. But, given nobody else thinks this way, then no, unions are not a conspiracy. A conspiracy is pretty much defined as such when everyone involved constantly tells each other "don…
You have misunderstood the analogy. 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 carte…
Individual unions seem more like companies than like cartels to me. Say there are a few thousand different candlemakers who currently ply their trade individually. Some subset of them decide to join together and incorporate in a company that will negotiate prices and contracts as a group, instead of individually. So they form Candlemakers, Inc., a Delaware corporation and your provider of enterprise candle solutions. This is not illegal, even though formerly competing candlemakers have joined forces and now collude in their provision of candles. They can even negotiate exclusive deals: maybe you get a discount on candles or otherwise more favorable terms if your restaurant/bar/church agrees to make Candlemakers Inc. your exclusive supplier of candles, i.e. for a period of N years you agree not to buy candles made by candlemakers who didn't join Candlemakers Inc. This is still not illegal or considered collusion.
Now if instead of it being contractors who joined together by incorporating, the candlemakers were employees who joined together by unionizing, why is this much different? And why do exclusivity deals legal in the incorporated case become illegal in the union case (the "closed shop", i.e. an agreement to only hire the union's members as candlemakers for some period of time)? They seem pretty analogous to me. The Candlemaker's Local 382 and Candlemaker's Inc. are doing pretty similar things: taking formerly individual candlemakers and joining them into a larger entity that markets its members' services jointly. They differ only in the precise arrangement by which the joined workers provide services to the purchaser: one is a union of employees who've joined together to sell their pooled candlemaking labor to the company, and the other a union of contractors who've joined together to sell their pooled candlemaking services to the company.
The place where the analogy to cartels works better for me is in large umbrella union organizations, like the AFL-CIO, if they coordinate their exercise of market power. But some of that is already illegal, e.g. secondary boycotts are illegal under U.S. law.
Re: Silicon Valley workers may pursue collusion case as group
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
yeah it's hard to find examples of high wage workers who aren't in some sense unionized. Not really sure what your point is though. After all, if their wages are in part due to being part of a cartel, then tech workers who earn that wage without a cartel are even more deserving of it.
Ok, first you write that "wages come from the value a person produces." Then you write "it's hard to find examples of high wage workers who aren't in some sense unionized." And then you again add something completely contradictory. But I do agree with you. I would say that tech workers are underpaid. Google has revenue per employee of $931,565. Most of that is profit. Is the average compensation per Googler anywhere…
There is no contradiction, but I may make different simplifying assumptions in different contexts. At first, I was replying to a person who claimed that even the free market wage for programmers was excessive. In that context I was ignoring market power on both sides, and assuming a perfect free market.
When you brought up unions, I pointed out that since tech workers have less market power than doctors and lawyers, they are actually underpaid relative to these groups.
To clarify: I think that doctors and lawyers would still be highly paid if they had no market power, because their skills/abilities are valuable.
So my point of view is that market wages are in accordance to the value that people produce, but people can sometimes obtain more by having market power (or less, if the employers have market power). It seems that you think higher wages only come from market power.
On a union for Googlers, what would stop someone else from joining Google and not joining the union, in exchange for better pay/conditions in the short term.
Re: Silicon Valley workers may pursue collusion case as group
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only people who don't understand that wages come from the value a person produces. Lawyers, doctors, professional athletes, also get high wages and are entitled to them. If you want to adjust income inequality you have to do it across the board, through taxation, not by shaming individual industries. We get paid so much because we produce that much value. But if these allegations are true, we aren't getting paid enou…
So... what do you think about the salaries of teachers in public schools? Also, I bet bank & oil execs believe they make the world-go-round and add a lot of value too. After all, banks & oil touches pretty much all our lives as much as computers do, right?
> So... what do you think about the salaries of teachers in public schools?
Well, it varies by region. There are some areas where teachers get $1,000/day compensation packages. But they don't really earn that money, they just use state violence to take it from people who earned it.
Re: Silicon Valley workers may pursue collusion case as group
#60Not that I'm disagreeing with this outcome at all... But if agreeing not to poach is collusion and conspiracy... Then how is it that it's legal for workers to form unions and strike? Isn't that just as much "collusion and conspiracy" from the other side? I mean heck, consumers organizing to boycott a product is a kind of "collusion" and "conspiracy" as well that is just as arguably "anti-market". Is there anyone who…
1) Secrecy. Both individuals and companies are allowed to openly band together for the purposes of bargaining power. It happens all the time with standards bodies, lobbying organizations, industry consortia, patent-sharing arrangements, etc. Doing so in secret is usually seen as market manipulation. One of the requirements for a market to be 'free' is equal access to information, which secret agreements prohibit.
2) Power imbalance. Others have addressed this already, so I'll let it lie.
3) This agreement in particular was an attempt to create and abuse a monopsony position, which is in itself illegal. Many markets are regulated in order to ensure competition, by e.g. blocking mergers. Secret negotiations are often an attempt to bypass pro-competition regulations, by having two entities act in concert while pretending to be independent. In short, ends matter. Collusion to commit a crime is viewed differently than collusion to ask for a raise or collusion to not by a product.