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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."
It might be difficult to prove the INTENT of the "no poaching" agreement was to suppress wages. Unless any of the defendants were stoopid enough to refer to such in emails or other discoverable documentation.
Not. Looks like things haven't changed in generations.
My grandpa moved from the east coast to the west coast back in the 50s because of non-poaching agreements in the aircraft industry.
Life? Bah, make me dictator for 8 years and I could straighten out the US. 8 years and then a peaceful transition back to a Democracy after everyone is back on equal footing in the eyes of the law. Really, only easy stuff needs to get done. Take money out of politics, codify a no national security clause to avoid the constitution, put term limits on supreme court justices, remove the ability of lawmakers to exempt themselves, and establish that corporations are not people in respect to rights granted them, so the constitution does not apply to them and they give them an actual legal requirement that they must also consider the general welfare and long term affects of their actions on the financial system as a whole. Also, lobbyist would be illegal entirely, anyone attempting to directly affect the outcome of and opinions of an issue through use of large funds shall be put to death and their assets used to pay debt or put into a rainy day fund.
Every year the HR people would make presentations to us about how they got together with HR people from other big engineering companies in the valley and decided upon job descriptions and pay and benefits packages, and by the way decided that the COL raise this year would be X%.
My coworkers, most of whom were oblivious to the big picture, would cheer at the annual pay raise and I would grumble about the salary fixing that they were proudly presenting.
I wonder if I can get in on the class-action suit...
Uh, the definitions of "free market" I know include such annoying details like "informed buyers", which unfortunately already makes this whole thing quite an utopia instead of something real.
> The free-er the market is, the better it functions
Not without the "informed buyers", it rather becomes a "lemon market", i.e. a market where only the cheapest product sells since nobody can assess the quality, which then drives down the quality etc. and rather results in a market collapse.
I guess you could consider "self-destruction" as "working perfectly", but I'd rather not see that variant implemented.