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Silicon Valley Workers May Pursue Salary-Fixing Lawsuit
First time accepted submitter amartha writes with news that a lawsuit alleging Silicon Valley companies of colluding to lower wages is going forward as a class action. From the article: "Roughly 60,000 Silicon Valley workers won clearance to pursue a lawsuit accusing Apple Inc, Google Inc, and others of conspiring to drive down pay by not poaching each other's staff, after a federal appeals court refused to let the defendants appeal a class certification order."
No... the lawyers will get rich, the workers will get fired, and the company will continue business as usual.
Eventually.
After years of appeals, attempts to bury the employees in mounds of paperwork and bleed them dry on legal fees.
Followed by appeals over whether or not the defendants, if they lose, have to pay the plaintiffs' legal fees too...
Meanwhile, The H1-B Scam is alive and well, just two stories down from this one on the front page...
They have a demonstrably anti-competitive agreement between purchasers of a service to make each seller only able to deal with one of the purchasers, creating a monopsony. Textbook macro basically argues that the effect of a monopsony is that the only buyer in the market now has basically complete control of the terms of any agreement with the seller, because the seller's only option is to not sell his product.
Another way of describing this: Imagine you work for Amazon. Without these agreements, you have these options:
1. Accept a 3% raise to continue working at Amazon.
2. Accept a 25% raise to go work for Google.
3. Not work at all and be unemployed or at least accept a massive wage cut.
With these agreements your options now are:
1. Accept a 3% raise to continue working at Amazon.
2. Not work at all and be unemployed or at least accept a massive wage cut.
This is inherent in these kind of agreements. There's no need to prove intent.
I am officially gone from
Remember, total corporate profits in the US are less than 10% of total wages in the US. "Evil big corporations" are certainly paying as little as they can get away with, but there's not much slack there in the first place. It's not like, on average, we could be paid 20% more if our collective bosses was only more generous - that money just doesn't exist (and small companies are on far thinner margins here - making payroll is a monthly uncertainly for most).
Why must salary increases for workers be sourced from existing profits ? Why could they not be sourced by reducing the ridiculous pay packages of upper and executive management ?
The point of unions is not to drive the "evil corporations" out of business. That would be counter-productive and stupid.
The point of unions is to put employees on an equal footing to employers when it comes to negotiations on working conditions and pay.
Generally, they achieve this goal well.