> were it not for him conspiring to prevent competitors from poaching employees, we'd be able to make more at our work places
So Apple, Google, Adobe and one other company agreed to not poach employees from each other and get into an expensive wage war. I don't see how that's automatically bad and here's why:
In the dotcom booms, salaries skyrocketed unchecked. During the bust, MANY people got laid off... with a certain salary expectation, which hampered them. I dated someone like this, she spent 6 months going into CC debt trying to swallow the pill that she just wasn't going to make again what she made as a marketer at the height of the first dotcom boom. She literally refused to accept the market rate for herself.
All Jobs, Schmidt etc. did is prevent people from being paid unreasonably (and unsustainably) high salaries. And we're already talking comfortable 6 figure salaries, here. You know what would happen if these were allowed to rise unchecked? The guys at the top would eventually get laid off at the first sign of a downturn. And their "net income" would likely be the same as if they never had their pay unsustainably raised to begin with.
An arms race is no good for anyone.
> we'd be able to make more at our work places
So that's bullshit. EVERYONE gets paid market rate, more or less. Anything else is not sustainable or requires someone being fooled indefinitely, which is impossible (unless they are a fool to begin with).