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Comment by skore | Hacker News Reader

[edit] Yes, I know we have a title limit here, thanks for pointing it out again and again. The question is why the, in my humble opinion, most important word of the original title was dropped.

OP: Revealed: Apple and Google’s wage-fixing cartel involved dozens more companies, over one million employees

HN: Apple and Google’s wage-fixing involved dozens more companies, over 1M employees

Maybe this is too nit-picky even for HN, but: Why does the headline here on HN only name "wage-fixing" (aka the symptom of the problem) instead of also naming the underlying cause like the article does: This is a cartel. Dropping the word has a whiff of spin.

I sure as heck hope they get the treatment they deserve and that this will strengthen the understanding that this type of stuff is exactly why you want strong unions. Judging from the history of both in the US, I'm not holding my breath, though.

View on HN

"Apple and Google’s wage-fixing involved dozens more companies, over 1M employees" - 80 characters

"Revealed: Apple and Google’s wage-fixing cartel involved dozens more companies, over one million employees" - 106 characters

HN has an 80 character limit for titles.

"Tech Corp wage-fixing cartel involved dozens more companies, over 1M employees"

would have fit snugly in 79 characters ;-)

Or "Apple & Google’s wage-fixing cartel had dozens more firms, over 1M workers"

>Why the, in my humble opinion, most important word of the original title was dropped

For the same reason HN wants to roll out pending comments.

HN titles have an 80 character limit. This has nothing to do with spin.

"this will strengthen the understanding that this type of stuff is exactly why you want strong unions"

Unions are fundamentally socialist. That isn't using socialism as a bad word, but as a factual description of the fundamental fairness and equality notions of union. In many situations it provides protection and balance between the employee and employer.

Does that really apply to highly paid employees who are actively recruited as standouts? The ones paid far above many of their peers because they're at the high end of the curve?

Unions are the antithesis of the solution. Indeed, the union approach would be the same problem (if not worse). There would be no standouts. No exemplary talents. Unions would mandate the specific lowest common denominator compensation and conditions.

Again, I see the value in some places, but it is woefully ill-suited for this situation.

Professional associations -- ala doctors and lawyers -- is more suitable for this field. Unions are not something most would benefit from.

That's not how M&P unions like the AMA and BMA work in practice your just repeating the union busters propaganda.

You negotiate the "rate for the job" if some one is good and need s more pay well promote them to a higher grade thats why you need to have a proper career track for all you staff.

I'm not "repeating" anyone's propaganda. I've worked in union situations before. I understand the ramifications of unions. As someone who tends to do quite well in this field, unions would be very deleterious for me personally: Unions are as much if not more about "equality" between union members, even where equality is measured by specious metrics (such as seniority), as it is about the employee/employer relationship.

The AMA is not a union by any traditional metric. It is a professional association. If a doctor is lured to a hospital for enormous sums of money, the AMA has absolutely no say over it. Nor do they dictate that another doctor has to be offered the job because they've been practicing for two months longer. Nor do they dictate that the doctor has to be paid for scale grade 7E because to do otherwise would cause resentment among other doctor's.

It would be great to have a professional association (presuming it didn't become too involved in its own enrichment). No thanks to unions.

I don't see any unions representing M&P grades negotiating these sorts of agreements as it woudl not be in the members best interest.

You know the entire uk telecoms infrastructure was revamped with zero fuss about new technology one of the main reasons was all the techies where union members.

And I know one ftse100 CEO was a union member and had been an activist and the CTO of one of the worlds largest phone manufacturers was a member of my branch.

as I said you just repeating folk propaganda based on stories about decades old "craft unions" which have nothing to do with how a union for developers/engineers woudl work

Nor does union have to do all that stuff. You're attacking a strawman.

But unions almost always concern themselves with such things. I may be attacking a "strawman" (ergo, how virtually every union on the planet operates), but humorously the salvation is just as much of a strawman, no?

Its how virtually all Unions don't operate - don't quote the propaganda leveled at craft unionism of the 1800's which has no bearing on real Unions of today.

You constantly speak of "propaganda" in this thread but do not provide any reliable data or citations to support your POV.

Looks like you are jumping on a bandwagon w/o offering any new argumentation. Echo chamber?

Screen writers and actors have a union, both fill some needs that apply to the rank and file but not to stars.

May be the model could work for developers?

> proper career track for all you staff.

That forces concepts which are nearly orthogonal in these types of companies (duties performed vs. value-added) to be artificially commingled.

While you could theoretically say that you can fix this by inventing enough job positions to be able to give the most-qualified the best wages, what really would end up happening is that you'd have a unique job position for every person (or in other words, exactly what you'd have without the union).

As a practical example, consider placing your union idea in the context of the NBA. "NBA Point Guard: Paid $11MM". But Michael Jordan was worth far more than $11MM to the Bulls, while even in 2014 Jose Calderon is not quite worth that much to the Mavericks.

So what do you do, split point guard up into "MJ-tier Point Guard: $33MM" and "not-quite-average Point Guard: $6.7MM"? Of course not; you negotiate with each player individually.

That is a straw man jobs in technology are not like professional sports or acting - having said that player unions and SAG/Equity do negotiate minimums so that not all the cash goes to the lucky few.

Piece of unsolicited advice - Stop declaring everything a strawman or propaganda. It does not strengthen your argument.

The situations we are talking about are actually more akin to professional athletes or sought after writers -- employers are actively seeking them out and recruiting them, at escalating wage levels, because they offer potential multiples of value to the company over "just any paper qualified candidate". Compare this to, for instance, auto-assembly or steel-working, where the difference in company value between resources is largely a wash.

We are specifically talking about the tech corridor right now. My home base is in the Toronto area but I seldom deal with Toronto area clients because the environment is dismal here: The pay is terrible, the product is terrible, and the mentality is of the "replaceable cog" variety, every project failing just enough until it's replaced by an innovative product made elsewhere. A union here might make sense because the situation already is pretty miserable. The same is true of the United Kingdom, to respond to another commentator. My comments about union specifically relate to the hyper-competitive, hyper-innovative and excellence seeking, silicon valley area.

The Pando article itself is spin. It wasn't a 'wage fixing cartel'. It was a non-poaching agreement, which may or may not have resulted in lower wages as a side-effect. I'm not sure it's even accurate to call it a 'cartel'. A cartel agrees to fix prices, which didn't happen in this case. They didn't even agree to fix wages, so the article is essentially bullshit in my opinion.

A cartel are competitors who privately agree to essentially not compete, and this can include on the production side (which in this case are tech workers). The unavoidable, and intentional impact of that is wage suppression. This isn't a "maybe", this is absolute certainty: A rising Google upset the apple cart by offering more than those other companies were, and everyone else was sour that they'd have to start paying more to keep their employees. This agreement, without any doubt at all, took money out of the pockets of tech workers.

I'm generally a fan of Google, but I have a negative opinion of Eric Schmidt. So many times he says and does things that seem so fundamentally detached from real life.

EDIT: Just wanted to add that the hero of this story -- the only one who actually saw that it was wrong and probably illegal, was Edward Colligan, then the CEO of Palm - http://pando.com/2014/02/19/court-documents-reveal-steve-job...

Not according to any defn i can see. All defns say a cartel regulates production and output.

While they didn't agree to "fix" wages. They did this for two purposes. One was to keep down employee churn , and so they can keep the salary lower. How do you hire someone away? One way is to offer them more money. How to keep the employee, one way is to offer them more money.

Then why the investigations by DOJ and Cal AG?

Because it is illegal. No need to be a dbag and downvote me because you didnt read my comment properly. Its illegal but not wage fixing and not a cartel.

Actually, I've never down-voted anybody.

Colluding to not recruit between those players sounds like an intent to limit (to some extent) employees options, which would reduce upward pressure on wages.

What would you call that?

Sorry, I assumed 3 comments = 3 downvotes. Anyway, I was just pointing out that it doesn't match any definition of 'cartel' that I can see. However it's still illegal (but not because it's a cartel).

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