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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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Company prohibitions against employees sharing salary information are also anti-capitalistic because they create information asymmetry.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
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.
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.
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.
He won't.
Someone is gonna jailbreak him after a day or two.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
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 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.
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.
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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.
Sorry, I have a hard time feeling any particular outrage for Jobs over everyone else here.
He didn't say, "If you don't agree, I'm going to sink you," he said, "if you don't agree, I'm going to send recruiters over to poach workers, the way that the honest system works."
So he's a crook here, but he was threatening Adobe in a way that only mattered if Adobe's CEO was ALSO a crook. This doesn't work if there's an honest person in the ring--it's crooks all the way down.
So said Adam Smith, but we all know "Smith" was just a pseudonym for Karl Marx.
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.
can't wait to see Jobs spend the rest of his natural life in prison over this one.
Ha, well if there's a god, he's certainly in hell. He's probably in the epic prick VIP area, right next to Hitler. And there are no handicapped spots for him to park his Porsche in there.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
If employees were so easy to replace then they wouldn't have bothered colluding in the first place.
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
Do you also believe in frictionless surfaces? Hint: crude approximations often don't reflect the real world very well.
A company withholding information from a competitor is a natural information asymmetry we understand as normal and even necessary to capitalism.
Preventing workers from discussing salaries is is not. These are two actors in the market who want to exchange personal information (not information belonging to the company) in order to improve their position in the market, and a third party (the company) prevents them from doing so in order to improve its position against them.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
Looking at the cost for the final connection from the power line/main water line is like looking at the cost of a door to try to say how much a store costs. The final connection to your house for power might be $500, but that's only for ideal connections. I've heard amounts in excess of $5k, and generally utility companies heavily subsidize final connections.
Consider if you have two competing water companies. In order to be truly 'competitive' they have to be separate. That means that they can't share the same pipes. That means that rather than running a 12" pipe to a neighborhood, each needs to run at least an 8" pipe. 12" pipe has more than double the capacity of 8", by the way, but it doesn't cost twice as much, as it only uses 50% more material. But half the customers are on each competitor...
Alternatively the companies would 'lease' capacity in their lines to each other, but if that happens they end up so tightly in bed with each other that they're effectively one company with two names anyways.
A secondary option that happens sometimes for electricity is that you have a service company that manages the lines, the company you purchase your power from is the one that arranges for 'your' electricity to get on the lines, whether that's by operating their own generators or just buying the power on the open market. But even then, there's such a natural advantage for the one that runs the lines in your area to manage that that it's a 'natural monopoly'.
This has been proposed for telecoms - your ISP arranges to lease the connection from your house and the appropriate backhaul to their facility where your packets then go to the internet at large. However unless the telecom company that owns the connection is forbidden from being an ISP(government regulation!), they have a generally insurmountable advantage along the lines of charging as much or more simply to lease the line than it is to simply go to them for internet service. Tends to kill competition.
I don't read AC A human right
Is there a coherent thought in your post?
I'll guess, based on the failure to chose correctly between "right" and "write", that you're incompetent, poorly paid or unemployed, and insanely jealous of everyone better than you.
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