Silicon Valley workers may pursue collusion case as group

Or you can cop out and say that since there is no perfect way to write a law relating to this, there should be no law. Which is effectively the law of the jungle. Some people prefer that.

You might as well just say "I use my judgement" as a (non-)answer to his original question.

Your suggestion that people asking for a (moral/political) philosophical justification of a law is a "cop-out" is simply anti-intellectual. You might not carefully think through your views, but some of us (i.e. crazygringo) at least try to. I know the idea is a little threatening (you run the risk of discovering your views are wrong, omfg!) and suggests possible tribal disloyalty, but please recognize that crazygringo basically agrees with you [1] and is just trying to understand intellectually why.

[1] I'm interpreting this from the first and last lines of his post.

Employers have a natural organizational advantage, as well as advantages of capital and resources. Given that virtually any workplace has a 1:n relationship with its employees, the bargaining advantage is with the employer. Within a labor market as a whole, a small number of companies may affect a huge number of workers (the case lists a handful of firms and 60,000 or more employees).

This was recognized by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations:

It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily: and the law, besides, authorises, or at least does not prohibit, their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work, but many against combining to raise it. In all such disputes, the masters can hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, or merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks, which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year, without employment. In the long run, the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him; but the necessity is not so immediate.

We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform, combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. To violate this combination is everywhere a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals. We seldom, indeed, hear of this combination, because it is the usual, and, one may say, the natural state of things, which nobody ever hears of. Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate. These are always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy till the moment of execution; and when the workmen yield, as they sometimes do without resistance, though severely felt by them, they are never heard of by other people.

And on for a number of paragraphs.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3300/3300-h/3300-h.htm#link2H...

Chapters VII and X of book 1 discuss labour, wages, and various differentiators among them. They're impressively comprehensive and informed, vastly more liberal than you might have been lead to believe of Smith (he really is quite the liberal philosopher), and still highly applicable today. I strongly recommend reading both sections, and more of Smith if at all possible.