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How Silicon Valley CEOs Conspired To Suppress Engineers' Wages
Oneflower writes "As we discussed last week, a lawsuit is moving forward that alleges widespread conspiracy among the CEOs of Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe, Intuit, and Pixar to suppress the wages of their tech staff. Mark Ames at Pando explains how it happened, and showcases some of the emails involving Steve Jobs and other CEOs. Quoting: 'Shortly after sealing the pact with Google, Jobs strong-armed Adobe into joining after he complained to CEO Bruce Chizen that Adobe was recruiting Apple’s employees. Chizen sheepishly responded that he thought only a small class of employees were off-limits: "I thought we agreed not to recruit any senior level employees. I would propose we keep it that way. Open to discuss. It would be good to agree." Jobs responded by threatening war: "OK, I’ll tell our recruiters they are free to approach any Adobe employee who is not a Sr. Director or VP. Am I understanding your position correctly?" Adobe’s Chizen immediately backed down.'"
There's a knock-on effect... for those of us not employed at the named offenders, the salaries are suppressed. I hope they're convicted.
You'd think, from a free-market standpoint, that collective bargaining would somewhat equalize the sale and purchase of labor.
But nah, us engineers are too smart for that. We're all superstars and we're always looking to stab eachother in the back for a percentage.
Except the fact that so many of the companies big enough to afford the better salaries and need lots of such engineers were in on it...
Someone had to do it.
If anti-competitive practices were not in place (much like the 90's), you'd end of killing the market--for example, who'd pay for a $300K/yr J2EE architect? Really? The demand chain would realize these social apps have zero business value aside from advertising and next thing you know J2EE architect would be making 70K. Really, ruby "rock stars" making 200k/yr (cause folks in the valley are complaining now when the average is $125k/yr)
Why do I have a feeling this 'we're not making enough salary' attitude is not about fairness, but about creating a boom market in the valley? Which we truly haven't seen since 2003 (aka the current market is just a bunch of clique groups padding each other pockets much like DC is with all their contractors "job hopping").
Collusion, by definition, is not a free market.
When you think of a model of the "free market", think of hundreds or thousands of small merchants gathered in a town square hawking their goods, with many of them selling similar items.
CAPTCHA: "parent is an idiot"
If only the tech workers of the world had a touch more self and class-consciousness, they'd be able to see that, often, management is actively working against their interests. From wage-manipulation & collusion, to selling sitting cheek-to-jowl with coworkers as "open" and "collaborative," there's enough to give even a naïve, "everything is awesome!!!," workaday programmer pause.
Wall Street got a wake-up call? Was there some imprisonment, some new regulation, or some other form of punishment exacted on Wall Street that I'm currently unaware of?
And the bits about cross-company wage scale sharing, and the preference for recruited vs. applying employees...
More generally, if this agreement were not of value to the collaborators(and to the detriment of employees) why would they have bothered to take the time and legal exposure to hammer it out?
He always had the reputation of being a visionary and major league a**hole. I guess he's dead long enough now that we can acknowledge the latter again?
OK. I am actually a free market libertarian software engineer. This does bother me, but I would suggest that the solution to these sorts of problems is exposure rather than laws. I don't feel that my ability to market my skills is significantly affected. I don't need to work for any company that would underpay me. Even though these are big companies, the percentage of software engineers they hire is a small percentage of the total.
As far as examples of negative aspects of the free market go, this is pretty mild.
I would suggest that a free market approach would be to go one step further and have shareholders conspire to limit CEO salaries. Those cut into corporate profits as well.
The fuck does the political alignment of the douchebags involved have to do with the economic policies that allow the abuse.
If you have a party that says "repeal all murder laws" and a party that says "murder laws are okay, we should maybe have them"(the political economic balance in the US). You shouldn't be going "Ha! At least one murderer was for the anti-murder party." as if it settles the issue. It's retarded.
How is this not self-defeating?
I would expect higher salary offers coming from outside the colluding companies. This would push many applicants to smaller shops and spread the wealth.
but the rest of them shouldn't. Pricks.
OK. I am actually a free market libertarian software engineer. This does bother me, but I would suggest that the solution to these sorts of problems is exposure rather than laws. I don't feel that my ability to market my skills is significantly affected. I don't need to work for any company that would underpay me. Even though these are big companies, the percentage of software engineers they hire is a small percentage of the total.
As far as examples of negative aspects of the free market go, this is pretty mild.
I would suggest that a free market approach would be to go one step further and have shareholders conspire to limit CEO salaries. Those cut into corporate profits as well.
Lots of luck.
A Corporation is NOT a one-person-per-vote democracy. It is one-SHARE-per-vote.
And guess who owns the majority of the shares in most corporations?
It occurs to me that GP might have been focusing on application "versus" recruitment. Recruitment happens whether the applicant applies unsolicited or applies due to invite. Employers do not assume a self-initiated application is a done deal. The applicant could have many applications fielded. To *your* point, recruitment happens when determining benefits and wages in either case.
Someone had to do it.
Yep, can't wait to see Jobs spend the rest of his natural life in prison over this one.
I know nothing of the subject, nor am I a lawyer, or even associated with Silicon Valley in any way, but it sounds to me like these practices are anti-capitalistic from the worker's perspective, who are denied the opportunity of maximizing their profits in a high demand / low supply situation where this would normally apply were it not for their bosses trying to limit this in an illegal way.
It would be good for the culprits to be convicted. I don't know the laws over there, but over here if a company leader commits criminal acts, he is privately responsible for the financial losses. I would not be surprised if these guys can actually cough up the $9 bn together, but if they can, drain 'em dry, I'd say. If they can be thrown in jail for a few years too, good for the people. And not VIP jail - actual jail. For once I'm sorry Steve is no longer here to see this.
Extreme? If you take into account the sort of damages and punitive measures that can be taken against (even accidentally) inflicting monetary losses on a single individual or company, and you multiply that by the 100.000 or so (directly) affected workers, I would sooner call the above a "mild" punishment.
(also, reason #237059380 Google is more evil than it claims to be)
Doesn't matter which party, for stunts like this. It really breaks both sides philosophy on the economy.
The Conservatives/Free market folks, don't like this, because it is manipulating the Market to get cheaper workers, and falsify the Demand for the workers.
The Liberals/Controlled Market folks, don't like this as this manipulating of the market is happening in back doors without the correct oversight.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
As usual His Steveness conspires to threaten other companies to go along with this scheme. Similar to his book deal conspiracy. Steve was the king of arsewipes.
OK. I am actually a free market libertarian software engineer. This does bother me, but I would suggest that the solution to these sorts of problems is exposure rather than laws.
This time they got caught out in a few emails, next time they will just keep it to verbal agreements on the country club golf course. The "exposure" is not going to come from a few or even many Engineers complaining in isolation that there might be some collusion going on as the alternative offers are drying up.
I don't need to work for any company that would underpay me.
and if you did you would not be able to get a decent higher paying job elsewhere due to collusion like this.
As a Technical Director (read: Guy in charge of a group of programmers), I know our company had similar agreements with other programming studios and technical firms in the geographical area we were located in. I learned of it by a slip of the tongue by our HR Director during a meeting.
I responded along the lines of "Well, if we would pay our programmers what they're worth after 3 years, instead of insisting on keeping them at Junior programmer rates, then we don't have a problem, and shouldn't need special back room deals to keep our talent". I unfortunately did not have the final say in pay increases, and did lose some of my staff to better payment offers. It was all I could do to compensate with treating the team with the highest levels of respect to keep them around due to shitty pay.
This was happening in Canada for context.
You're funny.
Only laws will prevent this from happening. Perceptions can be swayed by gradually introducing change and exposure and by gradually "normalizing" this obviously criminal activity. Exposure is not effective, it can be managed with enough positive spin. Only laws with strong deterients are effective.
You say about Apple, Google, Intel, etc. "the percentage of software engineers they hire is a small percentage..." I don't think you know what those companies do.
Nice troll, but I'll have fun with it...
1) conspire all you want, but Silly Valley isn't the end-all/be-all - there are lots of other just-as-exciting places to work.
2) You can gain more from their reputation than they can save by keeping your wages lower. For example, I could go there, do my time for a couple of years at $HOUSEHOLD_NAME, maybe do that at two or more of them, then go back to my home region with one hell of an intimidating resume, plus experience and ideas that can be put to damned good use. This allows me to command a far more comfortable salary/cost-of-living arrangement when I get back home. (Note: raw dollar counts are a stupid metric - always count cost-of-living, but I digress...)
3) Because of the above (and more), It's Silly Valley that loses out more than I do. I'll explain: I have personally turned down point-blank job offers from a few of the aforementioned names in TFA, because I already have similar big names on my resume, and they're not willing to compensate enough for the area's insane cost-of-living. What I mean is, after cost-of-living adjustments, they'd have to pay me $180k/yr or more to match the same level of financial comfort that I enjoy where I am now. Meet or beat that comfort level, and I'll move. Otherwise, unless I have no real alternative? I'll turn it down with a smile.
4) Because of the above (and more), the smarter tech folks are similarly clued-in, and are therefore harder to find and get (let alone keep) in that area. This in turn means this: over time, those companies lose out on the best talent, but upstart companies elsewhere gain that talent instead, allowing the little guys to more effectively compete. Meanwhile, Silly Valley winds up with a majority of people who boil down to two types:kids with no experience who leave as soon as they wise-up, or burn-outs chasing their own eventual start-up on the side (which means the latter will be somewhat worthless to the corp who hires them, and are likely stealing the company's ideas along the way while those ideas are still embryonic.)
QED: The market eventually does even things out, if you let it. Just because it doesn't happen on an instant-gratification timescale doesn't mean that it doesn't happen, eh?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Collusion, by definition, is not a free market.
...And since collusion is natural behavior in situations like this for company managers, it follows that in order for a market to be free, the behavior of its participants must be regulated.
Which, seriously speaking, is a rather interesting point.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I don't think you understand how pay works. CEOs and Sports Stars are not paid based on effort, they are paid based on projected ROI. You don't pay Peyton Manning whatever absurd figure he gets because he works harder than anyone else in the sport; you pay him that because you can make the absurd figure times 5 or 10 or 200 in ticket, merchandise, and advertising sales by having him available to the organization. Now most people, have an ROI more closely reflected to the intensity of our work. So it looks pretty bad when they don't work particularly harder than us but they get paid a hell of a lot more. What is fair shouldn't generally matter to what people are paid, but if enough people feel unfairly treated that is a recipe for crime and then civil unrest.
Well, no. That is why we do not have a free market, pure free markets require a very idealized society where all sorts of things that states and regulation take care of simply do not exist, and thus are not very resilient when having to deal with other parts of the system. It is kinda like communism or anarchism... it would work great if humans were, well, not humans, and some magical force prevented defacto forces influencing things.
What can they not afford? Losing the staff or paying them to stay? If the answer is both then they must be making a loss.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Collusion, by definition, is a free market.
And it's where markets will always go if the power players in the market are friendly/courteous rivals. It helps those at the top.
And it's exactly why truly free markets aren't good for the average person.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
The "exposure" is not going to come from a few or even many Engineers complaining in isolation that there might be some collusion going on as the alternative offers are drying up.
The exposure doesn't need to come from engineers. It can come from anyone who knows about it.
What you are suggesting is that companies can forma a cartel for software jobs. I agree this is possible, but I don't think it's easy to make this cartel industry wide. The larger the cartel, the more unsustainable it becomes.
As it is, there are tons of opportunities out there for talented software engineers. There is more software that needs to get written than there is developers to write it. It takes a lot of effort to become a good engineer, and there is going to be a strong incentive to compete for these developers.
Even in the article among these few companies, apple was struggling to keep Adobe from ruining the cartel, and ultimately the emails got leaked.
It's coming Silicone Valley.
Silicon, no "e". Silicone is the stuff in breast implants.. ..I’ll leave it to the reader to reinterpret the above quote in that context.
Blank until
My father once told me: If ten employers can sit around a table and decide how much to pay you, the employee should be able to have ten people sit around a table and decide how much you will be paid to work. This would be a union. (Or if you wish not to be be labeled union ... many in the tech sector think .... "I'm not a blue collar thug... I am a Professional" .. call yourself a special interest group)
The people sitting on one side of the negotiating table have specific interests to defend. The people on the other side have a different set of interests. That is why we call it negotiation. Hopefully to arrive at an equitable position for both sides.
Did it ever occur to anyone that the dysfunction of say Congress is so that there will never be an equitable solution for both sides to a given problem?
At the heart of all dysfunctional relationships (personal, political etc) lies on thing: Chaos. This way the people in power keep the power.
$0.02 worth. Or 0.00002 BTC
I was an Apple shareholder at that time. If Apple inflated profits through illegal activity - activity they knew or should have known was illegal and would result in future fines and restatement of earnings - then they didn't just defraud the workers, they defrauded their shareholders, too. We could see shareholder lawsuits follow if this class action suit goes through, and shareholder lawsuits - especially those brought by large institutional investors who have their own legal teams and would get the bulk of any compensation - likely scare the companies far more than this worker revolt.
Expect to see all the companies settle while admitting no wrongdoing.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
I suspect that this was not overtly about wages. It was about retention. You can't just say, well they could have paid them more to retain them. As the e-mails indicate regardless of any feasible wages it would always be possible to offer higher wages to a subset of employees that could cripple the organization. That's what this was about. People are not simply interchangeable. When you hire someone it's also an investment of your core strength into them. So in the short term yes perhaps a few employees could have been enticed by higher wages but then ensuing self destructive battle would have damaged all the companies fitness, lowering everyones wages. So it's not a give this lowered wages.
This is one problem that collective bargaining does address. It tries to maximize employee wages over the long run and side effect is that trade unions also normlaize wages across all the companies. But the union is always balancing a companies ability to pay with killing the golden goose.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Money and power corrupt.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
You do know majority means >50% right?
I don't need to work for any company that would underpay me.
And how would you judge whether a company is underpaying you? By comparing what the company offers you to the *market price*.
What the CEOs stand accused of is colluding to depress the market price for engineering labor.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
and this stuff was going on back then. They actually told employees they were doing it at the meetings where they announced annual pay raises. My coworkers cheered while I was dumbfounded that people missed the big picture. In essence they were saying "we've fixed engineer salaries with other big employers in the area so don't bother looking to get a better deal elsewhere".
When I left HP I went to work for Fujitsu- they didn't participate in the salary fixing- and instantly got 40% pay increase and kept my vacation time.
Unions also exist in a free market, and the serve the opposite effect of increasing wages. In a communist government, where businesses have ties to government, you can't piss off your boss, or you'll find yourself unemployed. Then other government-tied employers are too afraid to hire you because arbitrarily-enforced laws ensure that you're branded a criminal.
In a communist government ...
OT. Who was talking about communism or anything approaching it?
So said Adam Smith, but we all know "Smith" was just a pseudonym for Karl Marx.
This time they got caught out in a few emails, next time they will just keep it to verbal agreements on the country club golf course. The "exposure" is not going to come from a few or even many Engineers complaining in isolation that there might be some collusion going on as the alternative offers are drying up.
They obviously believe the hype the new world of tech is somehow different than the old world and are about to discover it often just make sit easier to find out stuff to use against you.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Which, seriously speaking, is a rather interesting point.
And one which many ideologues try very hard not to understand. "Free market" is more of a slogan than a clearly defined idea. I prefer the term "competitive market" to emphasize what's really important.
And how would you judge whether a company is underpaying you? By comparing what the company offers you to the *market price*.
That bit gets a little tricky. In some sense I do compare my salary to the market price. But lets say the market price for a software job was $20k/year. At that point I would consider being a freelance software engineer or starting my own company and hiring a bunch of talented engineers for $20k/year. If the market price were $20k/year, fewer people would go to school to become engineers, and this would lower the supply and increase demand for engineers.
Everyone making this calculation in their head has an effect on market price.
No single entity controls the market price on anything. Engineers have an effect. CEOs have an effect. Universities have an effect, etc.
What the CEOs stand accused of is colluding to depress the market price for engineering labor.
And I agree that that's what they did, and I agree that they probably succeeded to some extent
What I am saying is that I don't think they had a large effect. I think they had the effect that you might expect a small cartel to have. Maybe someone will publish a study showing all engineers industry wide make 20% less because of this deal, but I doubt it, and I made this doubt public.
Perfectly spherical merchants, on a frictionless planar surface.
So... Highly skilled engineer are too much of pussies to get unionized and claim their so-called "Rights", and end up crying in mother government's pants for new regulations... What a progress...
collusion and general douchebaggery is just as much of a leftist Dem characteristic as any other party
Even as somebody who is probably on the other side of the political spectrum as you, I basically agree. Where you go wrong is the term "leftist Dem". Just say "Dems". There are no "leftist" Dems, at least not in an economic sense, and in any prominent positions. In fact there have never been many "leftist" Dems, which is fine by me, but I do miss actual Democrats. They're a rarely sighted species ever since Billy Clinton's "third way". Corporate collusion is theoretically not a principle of either party, but in practice is a characteristic of both these days.
Silicone Valley is in Hollywood.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
It doesn't just happen in communist societies, but also in over-regulated societies as well.
Then why not say "over-regulated", instead of smearing an approach you oppose with an association with communism?
I only mentioned communism because I see the US moving in that direction rapidly.
In the direction of communism, or the direction of over-regulation?
Noooooooo no no no no. In a free market i.e. one without regulation, collusion certainly CAN and DOES happen. However, by the nature of collusion - where each participant has incentives to screw over the other participants, or non-participants can take advantage of the collusion - it is an unstable, temporary arrangement, and will fall apart sooner rather than later. In this example, say that the employees of the colluding companies are making $100k/year whereas they are really worth $120k/year. Non-colluding companies can now easily poach these employees by offering them, say, $110k/year. The more companies do this the more the wages are brought to their proper level.
Not that interesting in practice. No one sane would argue that the CME commodities markets are not free markets. They're a shining example of free markets working well, doing the sorts of things that economic theorists expect (unlike much of the rest of the economy).
These markets have a bunch of regulations - the key is that most of the regulations are market rules, not laws, and the power of the government is mostly focused on fraud prevention, contract enforcement, and preventing counterparty payment risk (a critical subset of the previous items). What's not regulated is price, nor legal preference given to certain sellers - no government-granted monopolies. That's what makes a free market.
There will always be anarchists calling themselves libertarians, but mainstream libertarian though expects the government to provide contract enforcement, fraud prevention, and in general enough criminal law enforcement where it's safe to trade.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Collusion, by definition, is not a free market.
Free market is whatever is good for a company is deemed "good". There is no Righteous principle that must be followed. If cooperation/collusion works best than cutting each other throat, then cooperation is good. If the SV engineer agree to be treated as a flock, then why shouldn't they ? They accept their condition willingly, unless of course they do not deserve the title of "engineer" and are merely good at pissing code without thinking. Just the same way they think they should be paid 300k for really creating no wealth.
What you're saying is something unsavory that businesses might do in a free market, isn't the free market. The free market means precisely that. Companies are free to collude, price fix, bribe, etc. It's only regulation that prevents it from happening. Just because you don't like one consequence of the free market doesn't mean you get to disavow it as part of the cost of doing business.
This is one of the primary fallacies of free market thinking; that businesses will be somehow compelled to do the right thing without the boot of the government on their necks.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Not spherical, cylindrical, like an air hockey puck. With a decent size press we could create merchants in that shape, and, while frictionless is obviously unattainable, an air hockey table comes pretty close. Give me that and I'll believe in the ideal of a free market.
No, we do not have a free market because the underling do not have a master mentality an continue to follow Kant's philosophy, which is more and more plaguing western societies...
You confuse "unregulated market" with "free market", much like confusing an anarchist with a libertarian. "Truly free markets" obviously don't work, but that's trivial and uninteresting. The interesting point is that it really only requires quite minimal government involvement to avoid the big problems (contract enforcement, fraud prevention, and the like), but once you start giving the government enough power to select winners in a market it's all downhill from there (hey mister cable company, how'd you like to be the only one allowed to sell here?).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The "exposure" is not going to come from a few or even many Engineers complaining in isolation that there might be some collusion going on as the alternative offers are drying up.
The exposure doesn't need to come from engineers. It can come from anyone who knows about it.
The only reason we know about it at all is because there was a lawsuit filed accusing them of this illegal action. If it becomes totally legal, nobody's going to be filing that lawsuit in the first place, and the parties involved will continue to do it secretly.
It kills me to see that each of these businesses were literally founded by techies or people very close to techies. They know the value of the tech, the techies and what the techies bring to a company. They know it first-hand because these techies made them rich. But they think they are rich enough and not getting richer fast enough. (In today's dollar-printing economy, that may well be true! They should be buying bunkers and private energy sources.) But they are, alas, too expensive because other big tech companies might want too buy them and we can't have that. So it's class warfare then is it? C-levels and serfs are we?
Well, I guess so. How the tech industry got by without unions and crap this far, I have to wonder. And I don't mean just labor unions but technology standards unions. Right now, we pretend that ISO standardization means something but Microsoft proved they can buy anything didn't they? We need something these companies can't buy -- something sworn not to let the things which have been happening to happen. And seriously? The "certification" game has gone on long enough. Most hiring people have wised up to it already. Certs are nothing more than brand endorsement that people pay a lot of money for. Disgusting.
Non-compete agreements? Hrm...
You know, I think I'm going to start using 'competitive market' instead of 'free market'? In areas where competition is impractical, such as water/electricity to the house, I prefer that the provider be a cooperative. Otherwise most of the regulation methodologies I support are designed to increase competition.
I don't read AC A human right
You are missing part of the equation. Buy a house in Slicon Valley and when you come to retire, move to a region with low cost of living, taking with you a much larger cash pile from selling that much more expensive house. Leverage can produce wonderful effects (it can also bankrupt you as many people found out during the recession).
I would also argue that start-ups tend to be in California because employment agreements that prevent you from moving to a competitor are not enforcable in CA.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Well no, the solution to the problem if you want to be all libertarian about it is for the workers to collude as much as the owners collude.
A union is a really good idea for workers and are perfectly in line with libertarian ideals (aside from the special protection they get from government and the public sector).
What I am saying is that I don't think they had a large effect.
What I'm saying is that Bob is a crook, but he never stole nearly as much as he wanted, so what's the big deal?
I see you crossing the line from "libertarian" to "anarchist" if you don't see a legitimate role in the government preventing this sort of collusion. Much like there are rules on all the commodities exchanges, backed by laws, that prevent collusion to corner the market in any given commodity. It's a very minimal low-touch sort of role for the government to prevent this sort of thing.
Had this been 2 small companies no one cares about colluding, I wouldn't see much problem either, but this is a non-trivial portion of all software jobs in the valley, enough to distort the market. This is exactly why you're not allowed to control more than 10% (or whatever it is, but I think that's right) of a specific commodity contract.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
In this example, say that the employees of the colluding companies are making $100k/year whereas they are really worth $120k/year. Non-colluding companies can now easily poach these employees by offering them, say, $110k/year.
So let me get this straight:
- Without the collusion between employers, the employees would make $120K/year.
- With the collusion between employers, the employees would move to a different company and make $110K/year.
- Conclusion: The collusion between employers is costing the employees at least $10K/year.
That's not a self-correcting system, that's damages. The companies who colluded can easily attract talented people making less than $100K/year by recruiting in different areas of the country (where techies frequently make less than $100K/year), or different areas of the world (where techies make far less than $100K/year) via H1B, so they'd suffer some turnover but no major disruptions.
I am officially gone from
Well? Many engineers see themselves above and superior to manual laborers which unions typically represent. Also their superiority has convinced them that they will become C*Os and the like making LOTS of money. Little did they know there have been so many big companies and their leaders consolidating and conspiring to make their output less expensive.
There's a LOT wrong with the current tech market and NONE of it has to do with true free market capitalism and everything to do with seeking to get around it or controlling it.
When you casually look at the whole free market idea, you should quickly realize that the free market is very much pro-little-guy. When the little guy becomes the big guy, things become a LOT more expensive and perilous. Too many up and comping little guys for anyone to remain king of the hill for any amount of time...that is unless they start cheating.
In free market capitalism, it takes a lot of work and good ideas to get to the top. It takes a continuous flow of work and good ideas to stay there. But that's not what the kings of the hills want. Like Microsoft, they want to dominate a market and then get by making crap and spending their money on schemes to keep other people from competing with them. Not free market capitalism.
I would also argue that start-ups tend to be in California because employment agreements that prevent you from moving to a competitor are not enforcable in CA.
This is often cited as a major reason why Silicon Valley (and probably the Bay Area and San Diego biotech clusters) even exists in the first place.
It doesn't just happen in communist societies, but also in over-regulated societies as well.
Then why not say "over-regulated", instead of smearing an approach you oppose with an association with communism?
Fair enough.
I only mentioned communism because I see the US moving in that direction rapidly.
In the direction of communism, or the direction of over-regulation?
Both. By over-regulating, the US government is gaining more and more control over the means of production. For example, coal/nuclear regulations allow the government to have power over electrical generation companies. The US gained more control during the US bank bailouts (and subsequent regulation of all banks) and automotive company bailouts.
If employees were so easy to replace then they wouldn't have bothered colluding in the first place.
anarchy does not equal "Free". Liberty is about rules by which civil society respects the liberties of individuals and protects them. Anarchy is about whichever individuals or groups have the bigger bombs, biceps, knives or guns. A bunch of billionaires conspiring to control costs by reducing the competition for talent is not about freedom rather it is about control.
One place where techies earn a lot less than $100k / year is the UK. Not a country you'd associate with little money...
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
I believe "the fuck" is that the GGGP called it out as specifically libertarian. So clearly your name suits you as you clearly cannot.
Where specifically is a word that has come to mean "among other things".
The same is true of the poor in America, who generally live better than the middle class in 3rd world countries. Given how well off the American poor are, maybe they should avoid "resentment not having the same path in life" as the middle class. Obviously they are "doing nothing but complaining of living [their] life as it is instead of [middle class]".
Isn't that saying the same thing as the parent? "If people weren't people this system would work great!"
However, by the nature of collusion - where each participant has incentives to screw over the other participants, or non-participants can take advantage of the collusion - it is an unstable, temporary arrangement, and will fall apart sooner rather than later.
One of the alleged provisions of the arrangement was to punish companies that reneged on the deal by targeting its key engineers for recruitment. At that point what you have is regulation by cartel. This, by the way, was what government *was* before the advent of the modern democratic republic state. An aristocracy may spend nearly all of its time fighting itself tooth-and-nail, but it closes ranks against outsiders.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It's the only reasonable explanation I've ever heard, other than my favorite: William Shockley's mother happened to live there.
That brings up 2 points:
1. Nobody wants to admit that Shockley is such a key figure in creating Silicon Valley.
2. Which other states have similar labor laws? I find it hard to believe that CA is unique.
The ego of tech engineer will be their downfall. And it will be deserved. Free market is not about little or big guy. Capitalism isn't about making a society happy and prosperous directly, it is about making an individual happy and prosperous, and assuming that the rest will be willing to make their condition better as a result. What we see now is a bunch of irresponsible crybaby unable to act on their own to fix a situation. What is implied by a class action lawsuit is an agreement that they are too weak to act against the tech giant. It is a demonstration of weakness. Weak don't have their place on top of the food chain. Don't act in the name of Free Market when you all call for is regulation and government intervention (ie. socialism).
Noooooooo no no no no. In a free market i.e. one without regulation, collusion certainly CAN and DOES happen. However, by the nature of collusion - where each participant has incentives to screw over the other participants, or non-participants can take advantage of the collusion - it is an unstable, temporary arrangement, and will fall apart sooner rather than later. In this example, say that the employees of the colluding companies are making $100k/year whereas they are really worth $120k/year. Non-colluding companies can now easily poach these employees by offering them, say, $110k/year. The more companies do this the more the wages are brought to their proper level.
I feel like the first two chapters of http://www.scribd.com/doc/1139... do a really good job of showing you to be wrong.
Anarchy is about whichever individuals or groups have the bigger bombs, biceps, knives or guns.
Then we must currently live in anarchy because it's still about having bigger bombs, biceps, knives and guns.
Really, these people are living up to the worst reputations of capitalism.
Collusion between competitors ruins the game.
If they're going to do that, then we as consumers might as well start colluding.
Or do we need to start unionizing the programmers? I mean... it sounds drastic but this is a serious issue.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
A free market is a necessary, but not sufficient, component of a competitive market. And what we really want is an efficient market.
A “Free Market” is when 2 people freely exchange goods. The problem is that there is a asymmetry between the people. One buyer has superior knowledge, for example when selling a used car or house. The seller knows if the car is a lemon or not. Or because there is a difference in power. Thousands of employees on one side, a few companies on the other. By collusion the companies are increasing their power relative to the employees.
You can’t eliminate this asymmetry – it is the nature of the beast – but you can minimize it.
Adam Smith's "Freely Competitive Market" is probably the best term overall.
Not a sentence!
Why is it that Slashdotters are so humor impaired?
One place where techies earn a lot less than $100k / year is the UK. Not a country you'd associate with little money...
Well, there are numerous problems with this comparison. You want to measure real wage, not the money wage. The real wage/money wage ratio for Britain is probably obviously higher than that for the US worker. Consider, a British pound trades for 1.65 US Dollars right now. After that, you factor in taxes (everyone loves to do that, right?) .
And, then you factor in things like standard of living. Everyone loves to point out the increased gas costs and rent, but not underline the fact that more people don't own a car, or even feel like they need to, because of public transportation. Like, I live in NYC because I hate driving, so it's a "feature" to me. YMMV. Google employees, for instance, save money because of amenities like the Google busses we're hearing so much about. Then you have to factor in the social services that are provided for each country. It is a lot cheaper to be pregnant in Britain. Yes, because the taxes are higher, but if you factor in taxes, you have to factor in what you're getting for them.
I haven't done the work, but I'd be interested in the results.
So you are saying that because in this particular example was discovered via lawsuit that that's the noly way these sorts of things can be discovered?
Also, it's not like this was discovered because of a lawsuit. Someone discovered it and then filed a lawsuit, and then made it public. Presumably this could have just as easily been made public without the lawsuit.
Does this mean Eric Schmidt and Shona Brown could be going to jail?
Just as soon as the Easter Bunny arrests them.
It all depends who is the initiator of action. The tech companies are acting toward their best interest, the tech flock are merely reacting. The a few in tech companies have created wealth from nothing, the tech flock are merely feeding on those few ideas and concept. They despise responsibility but still want to get their share of the cake. Though, there is nothing inherent bad at trying to maximize their own resource by the least amount of work possible.
See, this is another difference between you and me. You see the world in black and white, the Righteous and the Wrongeous. From my point of view, there is no such things, just ends. Whatever means to get to it is justifiable.
I agree with this. And as a person with a lot of friends who are on the far left, they would prefer to call it cooperation rather than collusion.
I would say that it is a better idea to remove the special protections that big corporations currently have than it is to give out special protections to everyone else to compensate.
So they're not only price fixing their products, now they're price fixing their employees
Of course they would have: If they collude, they pay their people $100K/year. If they don't collude, everyone poaches from each other and they all end up paying their people $120K/year.
I am officially gone from
- Conclusion: The collusion between employers is costing the employees at least $10K/year.
You cut out my next sentence: "The more companies do this the more the wages are brought to their proper level." Yes, in the short term there are "damages", but it will get corrected sooner rather than later without extra regulation. On the other hand, the extra regulation will stick around long after the initial problem is patched up, and has a good chance of negatively impacting things down the line. There's always unintended consequences to regulation.
Could you say that again, except coherently this time?
Libertarianism is an attempt to solve the problem of providing safety and basic social order with the minimum possible government that gets the job done. It's an optimization exercise. There's very little agreement on what that looks like, exactly, but widespread agreement that fraud prevention and contact enforcement (and some sort of criminal justice system) are part of it.
Anarchism is the claim that we can have safety and basic social order with no central leadership at all (anarchy means "no leader", not "no laws"). I view this like Marxist communism: cool idea, wrong species.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
No it's more like this.
Bob commits election fraud. Republicans say election fraud is a big problem so we need voter ID laws to prevent it. Democrats say yes Bob needs to go to jail, but that doesn't mean voter fraud is a big deal, and the extreme solution of Voter ID laws to prevent voter fraud would cause more harm in disenfranchising people, than the benefit of stopping voter fraud.
I am saying that yes people need to go to jail if they broke the law. What I am also saying is that more regulation is not necessarily a good thing.
Steve Jobs was not interested in some grand scheme to shave a few % off the salaries of engineers; he was interested in not having projects disrupted by staff turnover.
An alternative to illegal collusion would be paying them more money to stay around. Give them a contract that says stick around for X years and you'll get big fat bonus Y. It worked for Henry Ford. It's called a free market, which CEO's seem to be all in favor of when it's lining their pockets, but not so much when it's lining somebody else's pockets.
I generally agree with the point you are trying to make (freedom is unstable in the absence of some kind of regulation to preserve it), but I have a major bone to pick: Anarchy is freedom. "Anarchy" does not mean the absence of regulation. It means a free market of regulation -- free in the sense you're speaking of, well-regulated, not "fastest draw of their gun". It means nobody has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force (which is the textbook definition of a state, and thus the precise antonym of anarchy), but not that nobody provides that legitimate use of force (which is necessary to curtail illegitimate uses of force, and without which we would have "fastest draw of their gun" rule everywhere). It just means that the provision of that legitimate use of force (which is to say, the provision of regulation, or in simpler terms, protection of each market participant from the others) comes from voluntary agreements in an open market of providers.
Unfortunately that means that the "market for governance", as it were, is inherently unstable, and it is extremely difficult to preserve the freedom of it -- to preserve anarchy -- because preserving that freedom requires regulation, governance, and "A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned" (or to quote someone more classical, "Who watches the watchers?"). That means that a free market of governance -- anarchy -- tends to quickly collapse into collusion and "fastest draw of their gun" rule... which is to say, states as we know them. That doesn't make anarchy bad. That makes anarchy really hard to achieve, and states as we know them the unfortunate status quo that it's really, really hard to get rid of. Getting rid of one state is not so hard. Keeping another from popping right up to replace it, and doing that indefinitely, is the challenge.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Then you don''t understand the courts systems. Very often settlement agreements come with NDA/Gag orders. This keeps everyone else from knowing how a problem was resolved so they can also seek remedies. This practice very much protects the big guys from all of the many little guys with complaints and problems. Secrecy isn't there to protect trade secrets. It's there to keep access to the legal system expensive and prohibitive.
Do you also believe in frictionless surfaces? Hint: crude approximations often don't reflect the real world very well.
Regulation to some degree is required. There is no end to the ways business interests will seek to harm competition, consumers/customers and the environment. It is a human nature problem not one of the free market. If given their way, anyone would be able to enter the nuclear power industry and nuke the planet. We see what coal companies do when they cut back on safety costs. We see what happened when BP did it. We see what happened when TEPCO did it. Industries trusted to regulate themselves too often do harmful things. You just can't trust them to do the right thing unless someone is looking.
Some say rules are meant to be broken. That's bad enough. (Challenged, yes, but broken?) But current morality in business (if there is such a thing) says if there's no rule, there's nothing to break. And when the banking industry got the rules changed so they could make more profits and then crashed the financial system, I think it's pretty easy to illustrate exactly what the purpose of regulation and oversight are. We're dealing in large scale and global industries. What a few jackasses do can affect the world now. "Too big to fail" just means things have gone too far and haven't been regulated enough because when they screw up, the whole world suffers. Nothing like that should be allowed to happen. Free markets don't account for that.
You mean like how the H1B visa program has been used to push wages down by about 30%
42!
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
A free market by Libertarian definition cannot exist. When men get power, they abuse it. regulation is the only way to get a free market that starts, runs, and remains fair to all players.
By fair I do not mean "Microsoft is a miltinational company, so Bob's OS startup gets a multinational baseline to work from"
it means, no matter how well Bob does for himself, Microsoft cannot step in and squash him just because they do not want a competitor. Or collude with all the big boys to deny him resources, all the things that happen every single time regulation is slacked on an industry. And, as in this case, is done anyway in spite of the law. At least with the law in place you have recourse.
If it is not illegal you cannot sue to get the proof to expose it, can you?
>By collusion the companies are increasing their power relative to the employees.
Indeed. But even without collusion the companies are far more powerful:
If the company threatens to fire me I'm faced with losing 100% of my income
If I threaten to quit a company with a thousand employees, they're faced with losing 0.1% of productivity
Fair negotiation is simply not possible in that scenario.
And "free market" advocates tend to be opposed to the idea of employees colluding to raise their collective bargaining power to a more equitable level (aka unions, not that I'm claiming they don't tend to have their own issues)
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
...uniformly radiating their goods and services in all directions.
Man owns 50.00000001% of the shares.
Man decided to commit a crime in the name of the company. No vote taken, no point. his vote is sufficient to enact it. The rest of the shareholders know nothing of it.
Alternately, Board members own 50.00001% cumulatively. If they agree, the vote never goes beyond the board.
An ideal "free market" is one where there are no barriers to entry, all information is free, and all actors are rational. A standard "free market" is one with low barriers to entry, no fraud, and everyone knows all publicly available information, and acts mostly rationally.
None of these bear any resemblance to an unregulated market. Where companies can lie, collude, and the actors are not necessarily rational.
Learn to love Alaska
By over-regulating, the US government is gaining more and more control over the means of production.
Which is socialism, not communism. A defining characteristic of communism is an authoritarian government. Marx didn't believe in democracy. He thought change could only be brought about by an elite group running things. We all know how well that works out. By contrast, in the post-WWII era the UK became very socialist, with nationalization of the coal and steel industries, for example. I think it was an economic mistake, but the important thing is that they had free elections and no gulags.
Anarchy is about whichever individuals or groups have the bigger bombs, biceps, knives or guns.
there are many definitions of anarchism, but unless you are talking about the one popularized by the sex pistols, you are not correct. the basic tenant are law + freedom without force, and non-hierarchical leadership.
law + freedom without force: think of a small village where people's behavior is governed not by rules, but by social pressure. refrain from stealing my cow because if you do you'll be outcast from society, not because there are rules + punishment. think of why you don't steal from you mom. she probably wouldn't call the police, but you probably value your position in your family enough that it's not worth it.
non-hierarchical leadership: you can have a leader, but it's bob who lives down the street, not some guy 1500 miles away with 18 layers between you and him.
The colluding companies hold about 90% of the jobs in this type for their region, and a majorly significant portion of them nation wide. Salaries are calculated on averages. Working together, they keep the "spikes" from other companies' hires from throwing off the industry average. So nothing looks to hinky on the surface.
Indeed. IIRC the value of public services provided per tax dollar collected is estimated at being something like 5-10x higher in the UK than in the US. Our medical system certainly has a similar return when looking at dollars spent per patient - we pay much more per patient for substantially lower-quality outcomes. Still the best medicine in the world if you're rich enough that money is no object though. Woohoo! USA! USA!
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
These companies collectively off-shored $400B in profits last year. they can afford another $10k a year for their engineers.
Does this mean Eric Schmidt and Shona Brown could be going to jail?
Please, ask for the pony, too!
Except that as things shift theirs always incentives for new collusive alliances to form, so employees will always be losing out.
And exactly what negative impacts would you suggest might follow from aggressively banning collusion between employers? Hell, mandate that companies found guilty must pay out 200% of the total estimated lost wages over the entire period of collusion and many companies will be scrupulously avoid even the semblance of collusion. Especially if corporate liquidation and clawback of executive wages is considered acceptable means of collecting the money. Everybody wins (real people, corporations don't count).
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
What was it initially intended for?
I don't see foreign workers leading to lower wages being a bad thing. It means cost of labor goes down. The companies, consumers, and foreign workers benefit, while the people working in that field who had higher wages before are the only ones who get hurt. The workers being foreign doesn't even factor into it. It's almost exactly the same as if we created a computer to do the work for 30% cheaper. It just means the market is getting more efficient at accomplishing that type of labor, which is exactly what leads to more wealth for everybody - imagine what it'd be like if we were as efficient at growing food now as we were 200 years ago.
You are missing part of the equation. Buy a house in Slicon Valley and when you come to retire, move to a region with low cost of living, taking with you a much larger cash pile from selling that much more expensive house. Leverage can produce wonderful effects (it can also bankrupt you as many people found out during the recession).
You could do that, but the housing market is just as subject to ups and downs as any other market, and on average stays reasonably close to inflation. Don't get me wrong - I've seen it firsthand as a younger man in Arkansas, where CA residents would sell their ungodly expensive house and retire in the Ozarks off of the proceeds. If you do it with a long enough time frame, it's totally doable. Folks would sell their paid-off house they bought 30 years ago (at $12-20k), and show up with $400k in their pockets from doing that.
I would also argue that start-ups tend to be in California because employment agreements that prevent you from moving to a competitor are not enforcable in CA.
I don't think this is unique, really. There are quite a few states that will laugh at a non-compete nowadays. For instance, Oregon will tell the previous company to piss off unless the non-compete agreement was made under some *very* narrow circumstances.
Even in states with somewhat-enforceable generic non-competes, that non-compete agreement usually becomes null and void the moment your U-Haul crosses the state line - if not in the legal sense, then in the practical sense. Unless you're a C-level executive (or held patents the old company relied on), what company is going to chase you to your new state of residence, spend a ton of money on an out-of-state lawyer, pray that your new job has the exact same job description as your old one, and then hope that some years-off result falls to their favor? Even if your new job is a at a direct competitor to the old company, it's more time and trouble than it's worth; even with a favorable (to the old company) outcome, by the time it's all said and done? The 'damage' is done as well.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I am an experienced bullshitter! Where do I send my resume?
in 01, we had a small drive at HP to unionize after the Wicked Witch of the West started playing fuck fuck games with our pay.
Ho.
Ly.
Shit.
Upper management lost their ever loving minds. you'd have thought we had taken their children hostage. They released the pay freeze, reinstated bonuses... then shut down the entire division and outsourced it to Costa Rica.
Why does everyone believe this? First of all, running power cables and water lines isn't particularly expensive. Secondly, people could own the lines going to their house, and simply pay for the power or water separately to allow for multiple providers. The idea that this couldn't be a competitive market is simply a myth peddled by proponents of big government and government sponsored monopolies.
When the vast majority of the jobs are in collusion to keep the salary down, what will happen to the average salary that the rest of the companies calculate their pay scale off of?
I will give you a hint: go back to the 4th grade.
Not exactly. If a company fires you, you don’t lose 100% of your income. You walk across the street and get hired by another firm – maybe your salary goes up, maybe it goes down. And the company is going to need to hire another employee to make up that 0.1% of productivity – probably at around your old salary. A company may be able to jack you in the short run but they can’t do anything in the long run – if they slash your wage by 50% you might stick with the job but you would probably hit the want ads to find a better one.
Of course for this to happen we are making a number of assumptions – that there are other firms that offer comparable jobs. You need at least one. At around 8 firms collusion tends to fall apart – the benefits of cheating outweigh the benefits of compliance. At 16 it take firm discipline to keep it together.
And you have a few tricks up your sleeve as well, so that is going to balance things out.
Unions are something that we need when there is a strong imbalance in power. Most of the issues that with unions is that they are run poorly or corruptly. I can point to a few that work.
Unions also exist in a free market, and the serve the opposite effect of increasing wages.
In a communist government, where businesses have ties to government, you can't piss off your boss, or you'll find yourself unemployed. Then other government-tied employers are too afraid to hire you because arbitrarily-enforced laws ensure that you're branded a criminal.
One of the core tenets of communism is the communal ownership of the means of production.
If the populace doesn't own the government (e.g. a strong democracy), government ownership of the means of production cannot be communism.
What you are describing is simply fascism - a common component in economies claiming to be communist, but also common in capitalist societies where businesses have leveraged their much more organized economic power to gain control of the government, and one of the core tenets of feudalism.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The article and correspondence states "even if they came to us" they were off limits.
So applying does you no good. bear in mind, the employees do not know of the collusion or who is playing. So those applications are rejected more often than not simply based on the no hire rules.
they will be paid billions by the government to reward their unethical behaviors?
man, I need to figure out how to get in on this before it goes down!
These companies choose to live in an area where it costs $250k/yr to live at the same level of comfort that $70k a year nets you elsewhere.
they are trying to avoid the consequences of that choice at the cost of the employees.
I think the common and accepted definition of anarchy is something along the line of "absence of enforced rules" which invariably will lead to despotism or barbarism because the use of force to achieve aims is all too much a part of our nature. Someone will eventually use force, the most virtuous use of force is to preserve liberty.
. . . and where did this money come from in the first place, since at that time, most of these companies had PE ratios many times multiplied beyond any sane level?
This money was coming from Venture Capitalists. While Apple, Adobe, (etc) didn't really depend on VC money - all of their competitors did.
At some point, we have to recognize that some of the regulatory changes around investment, and the internet, were driving this money into the industry. It was called a "stock bubble", but actually, there was also a labor bubble. (followed by the housing bubble, as workers tried to diversify into real-estate, because by 2001, they knew that otherwise, they would not be able to hold onto that value).
The whole industry was filled with perverse incentives at that time, and it was only made possible by the way the government enabled the pump-n-dump mentality of the IPO culture.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
All that money they hid offshore- they are loaning it back to themselves to pay it to shareholders as bonds. guess what's deductible, as opposed to profit payouts....
A big enough circle has no outside....
look at the names involved. Where are you going to go as a software engineer? Bob and Frank's BBQ and operating systems?
>So, when buyers agree — such as on various "review" sites — that a particular product or service is overpriced, it must be prosecuted?
No, when the dominant producers of the product are found to be colluding to set the price it should be prosecutted, regardless of whther most peopl think the price is reasonable.
If I think $500 is a reasonably price for an HDTV that's fine. But if the market price would be $400 if not for industry collusion, then the industry has stolen $100 from me, even if I didn't realize it. Theft is still theft even if you cook the books perfectly and nobody ever finds out about it - you've extracted wealth from the economy without providing anything in return, and that hurts everyone, not just the people you directly extracted the wealth from. (Yeah, I'm looking at you, high-frequency traders. Walk away.)
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
there is a big difference between "should" and "will" go to jail.
The guy with a $50k bill for a single night in hospital is another example,
How much are they paying you folks these days?
Massachusetts which also has a tech cluster around route 128 IBM and DEC being two examples
Let me take your example and run with it: the buyers at an auction get together and decide to not compete with each other for certain items and later have a separate, private auction to trade those items amongst themselves.
Do you think that this legal? If so, try searching for "auction ring".
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
The ACM and the IEEE could naturally evolved into a trade association, but you know the members are too pussy to gang up and push back.
An old Chinese saying, power is earned by those who gang up.
New Economic Perspectives
Regardless of other opportunities, I'm unlikely to be able to just walk across the street and immediately get another job, and the company is unlikely to be able to immediately hire a replacement for me.
We're both faced with an indeterminate period of reduced productivity if we end our association. But mine is a 100% reduction, while the company only faces 0.1%. As such the company is in a far stronger negotiating position.
I agree that unions are worth considering anytime there's a strong imbalance in power. I simply believe that that applies to any negotiation with any company with more than a handful of employees. In fact it would be nice if everyone could get together to form some sort of meta-union tasked with making sure companies don't abuse their power to begin with. They could establish general guidelines, make non-negotiable rules that all employers must adhere to, investigate any claims of abuse, and inflict punishments upon individual bad actors. Of course the companies would have strong incentives to corrupt such a system for their own benefit. Hmm, that all sounds oddly familiar...
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
That sounds a lot like a free market - one without government intervention/regulation.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
That's assuming there is no worker specialization. In reality losing some employees will have a much larger impact. For example, if you lose a key engineer it can cause an entire project to fail. On the other hand, some employees actually bring down productivity and losing them will increase the companies income.
You are wrong about the core cause of this imbalance. The real problem is that most people need to work for a large corporation or they will literally starve to death. If people could work for themselves and get by, the individual and the corporation would be on roughly equal footing, since either of them could afford to walk away.
I don't accept that the definition of a free market doesn't allow for policing to prevent theft, fraud and the threat or use of force for intimidation.
The definition I found contains a subsequent reselling of thus-purchased items to in a "knock out" action" — at the higher price. That may be illegal, but it is not, what TFA is alleging.
BTW, "try searching" is not an argument — you want to present evidence, you search for it and present whatever link(s), that best support your case...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
You either missed or did not comprehend the concept of leverage. That amplifies the effect of inflation at the time you come to cash out. People with higher incomes in CA will benefit more from the leverage than people with lower incomes (but similar lifestyles) in lower cost-of-living areas.
The problem can be that family can tie you to an area so that you can't actually cash out.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I fully agree. Our goal should be competitive markets. Whether that means more regulation, or less regulation, our goal is increased competition.
Think about it in a different way.
When you join a union there is going to be a cost. You have to pay a negotiator to negotiate your salary. You will be unemployed for a few weeks (or months) when the union goes on strike.
Or you could go freelance. Personally, I have been downsized, walked across the street and got a better job the next day. (Well, 3 days – it was a long weekend.) That’s a special case. What is the cost to you in forgone wages until you find a new job? 2 weeks salary? 6 months?
That will tell you if you need a union or not.
And I don’t see the company as being in a stronger position. It fires you, then wades out into the labor poor, hopefully pick out a good candidate (all resumes lie), and then train them – all hopefully at a lower price than your salary. There are special cases out there but it is not the general rule.
As for meta-unions, they have been tried and there are conflict of interest issues. Unskilled assemblers verse skilled machinist. You might want to check out how German runs their unions however.
You just said they could easily replace those $100k earners with cheaper employees, so why collude? Just go straight for that $90k worker from Idaho or that $60k worker from Bangalore, right? Unless your assumption were wrong, of course. Which it is.
One problem I can think of is selective enforcement. If so many companies collude, then you can't possibly indict them all. Consider traffic violations as an analogy. Cops acknowledge that they can follow any driver for a few minutes and eventually they will perform a traffic infraction that they can legally pull the driver over for. Since everyone is guilty, this means that the cops can choose whom to pursue based on their own whims. Analogously, whatever agency is responsible for investigating collusion can choose which companies to pursue - perhaps at the request of a company's competitors? Further there's the issue of estimated lost wages. How could this be accurately determined? This makes me think of the RIAA attempting to figure out how much money they lost due to piracy.
Also, to whom would the 200% total estimated lost wages be paid out to? Employees that they didn't hire? Their own employees which they wouldn't have given raises to anyway? Employees they hired recently? Then employees would have incentives to pursue action against the company that has hired them even if there isn't collusion - compare to discrimination lawsuits. Would it be paid to the agency itself? Then this would just become another elaborate tax that companies would have to avoid by donating money to the government in some form or another. In any case the cost of business just went up since once you're large enough, you'll need extra lawyers on retainer to handle this possibility. Higher cost of business means less money for wages and higher prices for consumers.
Which other states have similar labor laws? I find it hard to believe that CA is unique.
Based on a few minutes of half-assed Googling, California appears to be nearly unique. Most governments are unwilling to interfere with contract law to such an extent; I'm a little surprised that it hasn't fallen to legal challenges. (Not that I'm complaining - as a CA resident working in a highly technical field, I think it's a terrific innovation.)
The issue has to do with mobility of labour. The H1Bs don't have as much mobility (the walk across the street to get a different job mentioned above) and so the employer has more power in demanding a lower wage from the H1Bs. It's an artificial price ceiling. If the H1Bs became free agents once they were granted their status, then the wage differential wouldn't be as large.
If more companies were able to experiment with nuclear power, maybe there would be some groundbreaking discovery which would solve much of our current energy problem. You can hardly blame TEPCO not to have forseen a once-in-a-century tsunamy. Your analogy with the banking system is interesting. If more "big bank" had actually crashed because they took too much risk, or even if the whole system crashed because it took too much risk, it would have been giving a better signal than the one given by all government, which was something like "continue to take as much risk as you want, the taxpayer is here to back your recklessness.". The system which would have emerged afterward would have had to learn about the reason of the previous failure. FYI, the core of the subprime problem was, at first, poor american with a subprime credit rating buying overpriced houses. How can you trust the government when the current situation is due to its own regulation passed over years ? This is the whole problem with Kant's philosophy (and the whole catholic philosophy): you are asking those who created a problem to fix it by creating even more troublesome problems.
conspiracy among the CEOs of Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe, Intuit, and Pixar
But .. where is Microsoft? Out of the picture - or geographical issue?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Oh gotcha. Yes that makes sense - so that was indeed a good example.
I would say the 200% goes to every affected employee working for them during the period in question, proportional to their earnings. (or perhaps 100% to the victims, 100% to the lawyers that got them justice, whatever) If it's estimated that an industry cabal collusive lowered salaries for pizza delivery guys by an average of 20% over the period in question, then each delivery guy that worked for them during that time gets a 40% bonus on his total earnings during the period in question, even if they've since quit. Those were the people directly harmed, they're the ones who should receive restitution, and in proportion to the actual damages done.
We could get more detailed, argue about whether people who left early on while the distortion was still small should receive less, and about whether salaries were suppressed linearly or flattened at the high end, etc. But as a rule of thumb "treat everyone equally" is a good first attempt at fairness, and "keep it simple" is a good way to minimize underhanded trickery. And 200% restitution means that even the new guy is probably getting roughly his due, if not the windfall of the early quitters. True fairness is an unattainable ideal, the important thing is that the perpetrators be chastised, and that those wronged receive restitution.
As for how to estimate the amount that salaries were depressed, that's a bit stickier. We could perhaps look at the suppressed salaries relative to other occupations in the area, and compare to the ratio in other, unaffected but otherwise similar areas and assume the "proper" ratio would be somewhere in the spread. That admittedly has its issues, but could be the start of a heuristic. It's not an easy question to answer, and would likely have to be answered on a case-by-case basis. But then that's why we elect the wisest and most incorruptible of our number to be judges, right? To guide the quest for justice on a case-by-case basis?
As for the incentives toward false accusations - well I've always felt that false legal accusations should be punished proportional to the damage that they cause. Just one of he ways in which a loser-pays legal system has an advantage. I'm sure there's plenty of other solutions as well.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
FTFY
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I was thinking meta-unions ~= democratic government myself: the force-concentrated arm of of the many-but-weak against the few-but-powerful.
Sounds like you're in a high-demand occupation. Congratulations. Now try that stunt as and office- or factory- drone. i.e. as a normal person.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Take it from me. I ... not sure it's quite safe to say so precisely just now, but let's just say I know some things as of the end of last year, I worked for a company closely related to TEPCO. But there is information on the internet now which can be searched with shows many things I am not allowed to say factually such as in the construction there was a natural seawall at the site which was high enough to protect the plant from that and larger tsunamis. (It was the reason that site was selected if I recall correctly) but it was taken down to enable easier construction and then rebuilt afterward but not as high. (Would have been too expensive you know) So to save money, they removed safety and when adding it back, they didn't quite do it well enough. Also, it might interest you to know another nuclear site was hit by the same tsunami. THAT site had a seawall of adequate size -- larger than the one at the Fukushima site. Funny how one site elected to protect it adequatetely while another didn't. Different decision makers I suppose. But you don't hear about that surviving site very often in the news... it's not quite news and it clearly illustrates where the blame lies.
People want to believe that no one could have predicted the unprecedented tsunami. And yet there is evidence that someone DID predict it and took measures to secure against it. Just not there. With public information alone there is sufficient evidence to put to rest any notion that the problem was unforseeable. It wasn't. Someone else did and was able to act on it.
If people are interested to know more, ask me again after April of this year.
A Corporation is NOT a one-person-per-vote democracy. It is one-SHARE-per-vote.
Sometimes it is not even one-share-per-vote. Thanks to inventive structures involving different share classes, the owners of a tiny minority of shares can sometimes end up controlling the majority of the vote.
An old Chinese saying, power is earned by those who gang up.
I think Mao said it better when he said that "Power flows from the barrel of a gun."
That is all.
Do you mean the settlements before the mega-bonuses, or after, or both? And do you mean settlement payments made with funds acquired from TARP, which doubled the national debt and gave it all in interest-free (negative real interest) loans with no date due?
Yes, I was very aware of it. I was also aware of what it did to the job market, since it crashed a huge number of businesses, and put employees on the street without job, house, or home.
Yes. That was quite a wakeup call.
Do you think the bankers missed it? Or do you think they noticed?
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Sounds like you're in a high-demand occupation. Congratulations. Now try that stunt as and office- or factory- drone. i.e. as a normal person.
Don't underestimate the negotiating power of a good employee even in a "drone" job.
I had a friend working at a fast food joint that tried to quit multiple times and each time
his manager offered him a raise to come back.
I also know dozens of people who have left a job as a waiter,waitress,cashier,stocker,etc...
and come back on the summer/weekends and pick up extra shifts like they never left.
I also know people in IT that have left for a year and then come right back without even an interview.
And as an employer, I would gladly hire or rehire any good employee that walks in my door and
the number one complaint I hear from other employers is that it's hard to find good employees.
Why do you think these CEOs made this agreement? My guess it wasn't so much to supress
wages but rather to stop playing musical chairs with all their good employees.
If you're a good worker you can usually always find a job and are generally always
welcomed back by former employers with no questions asked.
Nope, not a high demand job - just moderate. I was lucky that job market was tight and I already had my resume out there. Which goes back to being a freelance - I suspect that I would have to wait much longer to pick up my next job in the current market so I would have to factor that in my equations. On the other hand I have seen factory workers go on long strikes. mixed bag.
Regardless of the goal, the result is to suppress wages. Besides, if we're all equals here and the goal is just to stop playing musical chairs then why doesn't my employer encourage me to come to them with any head-hunting offer and sit down with representatives from both companies to let them bid for my services? I end up with whoever values me higher, and all it cost was a bit of negotiation, no musical chairs required. *That's* the free market solution. Not agreeing not to offer each others employees wages closer to what we believe they're really worth.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Ah yes, the invisible hand is more efficient than regulation. The difference is that the invisible hand benefits the bad actors before the correction, and regulation punishes the bad actors. So the difference between the invisible hand and regulations is, do you want a system that encourages people to act in everyone's worst interest?
Learn to love Alaska
Libertarianism is inherently anti-democratic. The problem is, if the people aren't governed popularly, how do you get the support of the disenfranchised? Exploit until revolt? Have a "libertarian" government with a standing army large enough to defeat any insurrection?
Learn to love Alaska
Unions assume they have the right to use force, and they occasionally even resort to murder. There is no place for them in a free market.
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Libertarianism is the belief that any power vacuum in government will be filled by a benevolent dictator who will give up power the first time it's asked of him.
Learn to love Alaska
I have a major bone to pick: Anarchy is freedom.
You go on about a market. I'm not sure what that has to do with anarchy.
It means nobody has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force (which is the textbook definition of a state, and thus the precise antonym of anarchy), but not that nobody provides that legitimate use of force (which is necessary to curtail illegitimate uses of force, and without which we would have "fastest draw of their gun" rule everywhere). It just means that the provision of that legitimate use of force (which is to say, the provision of regulation, or in simpler terms, protection of each market participant from the others) comes from voluntary agreements in an open market of providers.
That's just one of the many forms of libertarianism. The government exists to stop the person who first used violence, and arbitrate when both use violence. Anarchy is absence of government. In practice a government that weak is rapidly deposed by a warlord. Anarchy *is* feudal warlordism. Anarchy may be an ideal, but the real world abhors a vacuum, even a power vacuum, and a government with no power leaves an attractive target.
Getting rid of one state is not so hard. Keeping another from popping right up to replace it, and doing that indefinitely, is the challenge.
Doing that for one day is hard. If you achieve anarchy at 8 a.m., you'll have a "government" by noon, even if it's only local, and warring with the other "local" warlords. Since anarchy is impossible, why bother to debate it? A benevolent dictatorship is better.
Learn to love Alaska
Not just large companies. Employee defections are potentially much more damaging to smaller businesses, where the knowledge and skillset at risk of being poached is distributed among many fewer people. Companies like Apple and Google and Facebook are worried about labor costs, but losing a key engineer is far more damaging to a 20-person startup, where getting to market quickly is essential.
(Again, I'm not arguing against the CA law - it's just such a weird anomaly. I'd be curious to know if there's any hard evidence for direct effects on salaries in different industries.)
Nope, it's the institutional investors who vote along the lines of the chairman's recommendations, efectively putting the board/CEO as a majority shareholder, so long as they don't piss off the institutions.
Learn to love Alaska
One of the functions of proper government is to codify a single standard of the legitimate use of force. In the absence of government, anarchy, there is no such single standard. It is not possible to know what legitimate force is. There is no mechanism to deal with psychopathic behavior. Those two problems do make anarchy bad.
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Then we must currently live in anarchy because it's still about having bigger bombs, biceps, knives and guns.
Indeed...viewed internationally, we live in an anarchy of nation-states.
The U.N. has no real enforcement powers...the General Assembly is little more than a forum for expressing hatred.
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
When men get power, they abuse it.
That's strange...whenever I get power, I just end up with current and voltage. I must be doing something wrong.
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
You haven't the faintest idea what stealing is and what voluntary action is.
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Companies assume they have the right to use force, and they occasionally even resort to murder. There is no place for them in a free market.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
In most large companies the majority of the shares are owned by funds. Very few funds actively participate in corporate governance, and those that do do more harm than good.
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You can claim most are false, and identify what you think I was thinking of, but until you identify a definition of what I said I was talking about, your words are no more useful than a 3-year old with his fingers in his ears chanting "I can't hear you" repeatedly.
Learn to love Alaska
Most stealing is voluntary.
Play Command HQ online
Yeah, unions can suck, everyone knows this. It's about power balance, and it has been and always will be ugly. Sometimes the choice is between unionizing and being completely fucked over. Up to now I'd say engineers don't really need a union, they'd do more harm than good, but that may change some day.
Play Command HQ online
To answer your question it is corporation, then unions and employees.
The unions and employees in various retirement and investment funds. Personally ownership of stock is rather low.
A Corporation is NOT a one-person-per-vote democracy. It is one-SHARE-per-vote.
Sometimes it is not even one-share-per-vote. Thanks to inventive structures involving different share classes, the owners of a tiny minority of shares can sometimes end up controlling the majority of the vote.
Yup. The most common version of this is Preferred Stock. Although I once got suckered into buying shares of a start-up that had a class with the worst of common and the worst of preferred shares combined.
extremely left wing, pro big government. (Really I say that because I knew a fellow student in college who said they were an anarchist. Oddly enough there was no big government policy that they weren't totally for. For those that don't know anarchy literally means no rulers so this was a case of them not quite understanding what anarchy is supposed to be about.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
Casteism
Anarchism firstly believes that everyone has a right to exist. That means/implies a right to homestead; own and manage land for sustanence.
You are correct that anarchists do not believe in leaders, per se. Because it leads to heirarchies and patronages.
That is not to say there are no leaders, only that they are driven from below AOT above and everyone participating has a seat/voice at the table.
Led or Leaderless, even the dumbest anarchist understands the need for strategic planning. Its more then about how the planning gets done and executed.
I know of few, if any, real anarchist communities; but the coops and guilds come close; the stories of the Basque Mondragon is a good model perhaps, as is the work currently being done in S.America
resist propaganda
Nope. Agreement to not actively poach does not stop anyone from applying on their own. That would be a non-compete clause and a whole different subject. I've read a claim that most employees who use an offer as leverage with their current employer end up leaving within a year anyway. Bidding wars no doubt happen for a small fraction of people, but for most I would expect the companies to have a take-it-or-leave it policy. They want to hire people who want to work for them.
It's only hard to find good employees if the company has its head up its collective ass. Not long ago I interviewed (through the slimiest recruiter I've ever encountered) with a company sited across a lake and toll bridge. They cling to an obsolete OS version and wanted me to spend 1.5 hrs every day commuting so I could sit at a cluster of desks shoved together 8' from their suite door. For this they offered substandard benefits and less money than I was already making. The newish IT director was decent enough, but the others I interviewed with included a twitchy paranoid type and a cocky slob. Other places took over a month to get back to me, or had interview processes including skills outside of the scope of the job. I'm not a swdev, don't ask me to code college algorithms class problems on a whiteboard while an H1-B records my every move. In the silly valley there's perhaps always a job across the street, but for the rest of us, often not. And I really don't want to move my family to that nightmare of a region and pay $4k / mo rent for a tiny home.
I was specifically commenting on the fact that the original poster stated that office and factory drones have a hard time finding jobs.
If you have a specialty then finding a job in your field can be difficult depending on the field but the "drone" jobs that pay close to
minimum wage are easy to come by if you're a good employee. Of course if you're a good employee then you will quickly be able
to demand more than most of the "drone" jobs pay but that's a different topic.
Globalization is Zero-Sum.
Amend your Constitution accordingly. https://www.constituteproject....
Otherwise your future generations will regret. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
Casteism
I gave my definition, and he disagreed. So what is your next step then?
Learn to love Alaska
By whose definition? A free market is a market in which people have free choice about how they buy and sell goods and services. Nowhere does that require that the participants in that market can't talk to each other or even make agreements between them. Most of these arrangements are, in fact, self-defeating, and most of them are rooted in government-created barriers to entry.
And if a group of those merchants decides to try some price fixing, they are going to discover quickly that others are going to find it profitable to defect the arrangement and take their business.
Collusion among market participants can be a problem in some situations, but most of the time, it is simply irrelevant.
No, he has a point.
Most people use “Free Market” in a sloppy, non-precise term. A Free Market does not require most of those things – it only requires 2 willing participants.
Your definition is closer to a “perfect market”. Do they exist? No. Do inelastic spherical cows exist? No. yet physics use them as a starting point. You loosen the assumptions, introduce friction and other inefficient , and see what happens. A good example is that both individuals need perfect free information. Can’t happen in the real world but it does lead to interesting questions. How do we lower the cost? (headhunters? Internet want ads?). How much are we willing to pay? (How many applications do we submit? How much effort should be put into the resume?) etc.
Let me explain why it is a bad thing.
The Companies shareholders benefit.
The Consumers do not benefit, because the cost savings are never passed on. For example, milk, when adjusted for inflation is only part of the equation. Rather, the cost to produce a gallon of milk was reduced 85% thanks to automation, better breeding, cows that now produce 2.5 gallons of milk for every 1 gallon that used to be produced. That "modernization/industrialization/automation" benefit is NOT being passed to you or me, the consumer.
Second, foreign workers benefit, yes...and the cultural exchange is POSITIVE. Which is why I do support it.
But the economy is hurt. Because you see, when a programmer (or middle class worker) makes $75,000, he spends a chunk of that money on frivolous local expenditures. We hit the cup cake shop, the coffee shop, amusement parks, and buy a flat screen TV. All of the above except the latter put money into the local economic system encouraging further spending. The TV only inputs minimal value, as it's manufacture is made abroad. Most of it's profits are harvested by the big corps and spun off to shareholders. A small amount of profit is applied locally to a barely above minimum wage worker. This barely meets living needs and as such does not really encourage economy growth.
Shareholers - uber elites, hold money and use it mainly for accumulation of further holdings. In a sense, they exchange money for more money, but not for growth. Minimal amount of money is moved. If I take $1 billion and buy $1 billion. It is a single transaction. Where as $1 billion respent by thousands of middle class is high velocity. And grows economy.
Furthermore, billionaires expend a very minimal amount of money. A $1 billion yacht only creates a few hundred jobs. Where as the middle class expending $1 billion creates thousands of jobs.
Trickle down economics work, but only when the trickle down comes from the middle class. Trickle down economics fails when the wealth is held by the elites, as they operate as hoarders. Hurting the entire economy.
Agreed....an H1B should be granted to the worker, and not tied to ANY business. At least not after the 1st year committment.
It also creates a fire at will mentality. Companies no longer employee people. Rather, they contract thanks to the H1B flow. So if I want to change languages, I simply fire all and hire new. The H1B creates an artificial pool of employees that let's a complany have zero obligation to its workers.