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Comment by RIMR | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, businesses will use any excuse they can find to lower wages.

I also shop around for lower prices. I think many people do, at both work and at home.

Companies will pay as much as the market requires them to, and they will even illegally collude to manipulate that market (eg Steve Jobs) and strive to atomize workers against coordinating for better pay and conditions (while themselves coordinating via C-level social groups, investors and wage & benefits consultancies for market research data and guidance)

To be unfair, you mean.

I don't think that's an accurate framing. Businesses and employees are inherently in a relationship where they want pay to go in different directions, because they don't have the same shared interest. Exploitative labor practices are real, but it's not reasonable to argue that all lowering of labor costs is unfair, any more than it would be reasonable to argue that any employee getting his salary increased is unfair.

At this point in time in most US employment sectors, I believe employers have the upper hand over employees and are squeezing them. Under a different set of laws and courts, the balance could shift the other way. But we have seen a massive wealth transfer from the poor to the wealthy and from the young to the old over the last 40 years and the labor market in part reflects the inequality that wealth transfer creatwd.

And the US just voted back in the political party whose goals include increasing inequality, helping employers keep the upper hand, squeezing workers, and accelerating that transfer from the poor to the wealthy. It’s going to get much worse before it even has a chance to get better.

>I don't think that's an accurate framing.

Maybe not in theory, but it is in practice.

Whereas, referring to the rest of your comment, it may sound right in theory, but doesn't work in practice.

Related replies by thefaux:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42652732

and ryandrake:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42652908

also agree with what I said.

Steve jobs emails Eric Schmidt:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38769203

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greenyoda on Dec 26, 2023 | next [–]

https://nitter.net/TechEmails/status/1443263744906305543

Context:

> High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation is a 2010 United States Department of Justice (DOJ) antitrust action and a 2013 civil class action against several Silicon Valley companies for alleged "no cold call" agreements which restrained the recruitment of high-tech employees.

> The defendants were high-technology companies Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay, each of which was headquartered in Silicon Valley, in the southern San Francisco Bay Area of California.

> The civil suit was filed by five plaintiffs. It accused the tech companies of collusion between 2005 and 2009 to refrain from recruiting each other's employees.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

oldgradstudent on Dec 26, 2023 | parent | next [–]

But why a civil suit?

This is a criminal matter. It should not be too hard to prove criminal intent :

> A few months later, Schmidt instructed a fellow exec not to discuss the no-call list other than “verbally,” he wrote in an email, “since I don’t want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later?”

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/02/google-apple-cl...

bryanrasmussen on Dec 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

ok well obviously "why not both" would be the rejoinder, but I'm not actually sure I follow the reasoning that this is a criminal law matter?

greenyoda on Dec 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

There was both a civil suit (brought by five employees) and a criminal complaint brought by the DOJ. The criminal complaint was about a violation of antitrust law:

> On September 24, 2010, the United States Department of Justice Antitrust Division filed a complaint in the US District Court for the District of Columbia alleging violations of Section 1 of the Sherman Act. In US v. Adobe Systems Inc., et al., the Department of Justice alleged that Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, and Pixar had violated Section 1 of the Sherman Act by entering into a series of bilateral "No Cold Call" Agreements to prevent the recruitment of their employees...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

oldgradstudent on Dec 26, 2023 | root | parent | next [–]

Complaint against companies, not against individual actors for some reason. The final judgements in both resulted in meager compensation and achieved zero deterrence.

Why haven't Eric Schmidt or Steve Jobs spent a single day in jail or become felons? The DOJ didn't even try.

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