But if agreeing not to poach is collusion and conspiracy...

Then how is it that it's legal for workers to form unions and strike? Isn't that just as much "collusion and conspiracy" from the other side?

I mean heck, consumers organizing to boycott a product is a kind of "collusion" and "conspiracy" as well that is just as arguably "anti-market".

Is there anyone who can explain how the law differentiates between them? I have zero legal background/knowledge of these things...

Edit: To be clear, I think unions can be great things, and think the anti-poaching agreements are bad... I'm just trying to figure out a way to reconcile these in my mind! :)

But, given nobody else thinks this way, then no, unions are not a conspiracy. A conspiracy is pretty much defined as such when everyone involved constantly tells each other "don't tell anyone" which is what these jackasses did (go read the emails). Unions are very public about going on strike and have big votes on it, thus not a conspiracy. Same with consumers organizing a strike, or just about everything you came up with.

Collusion is also not bad unless it's illegal, and what we've decided in the US is that gigantic billion dollar companies are not allowed to get together and screw over poor work slobs who make maybe $100k/year with their collective MegaCorp trillion dollar might. In fact, any decent human being would be enraged at a giant corporation using its power to smash a little guy to make a few thousand more per employee a year.

> Collusion is also not bad unless it's illegal

Did it ever occur to you that laws might be passed despite those same laws not being beneficial? In your model of the world, where legal actions are all, by definition, good, how would legislators decide whether or not to enact a prospective law? If we repealed all our antitrust legislation, can I assume you would agree that employer collusion to hold down wages used to be bad, but was now good?

> no, unions are not a conspiracy. A conspiracy is pretty much defined as such when everyone involved constantly tells each other "don't tell anyone"

I have to agree with the bare semantics here, but... who's alleging that the harm from a bunch of companies secretly agreeing to hold down wages comes, entirely and only, from the fact that the agreement is secret? They do it in secret because it's illegal, and your parent is wondering why employees are legally allowed to do openly what employers must do in secret. Why is there supposed to be a difference? Is there a justification for punishing the companies, other than the fact that their conduct is illegal?

Nothing can be bad because it's illegal; belief following that reasoning is religious, not valid.

Your disagreement on semantics is just plain wrong. If the law they broke is a "conspiracy" law, then the fundamental difference between what these companies did and what a union does is the "secret" part of a conspiracy. It's not a conspiracy if everyone knows about it. In addition, them going around warning each other to keep it secret is a direct admission of guilt that they knew it was illegal. Some of the emails even say it's illegal, so they knew it was illegal and conspired to do it anyway. Get it? That's a conspiracy.

> I said this law is right.

Here are your words: "Collusion is [...] not bad unless it's illegal, and what we've decided in the US is [...]". Looking at this, and the rest of the comment, I can see that:

1. You can imagine US collusion law being in a state other than what it is ("what we've decided in the US is [...]").

2. The only argument you present is that the conduct described is illegal.

3. You specifically acknowledge that in some sense, the fact that the conduct described is illegal is a coincidence (in modal logic, it is not a necessary truth); it's how the US decided to handle the law.

As the existence of the law is the only argument you presented for the badness of the conduct, I conclude that you are arguing that the conduct is bad because the law prohibits it.

The alternative, that you are asserting with no justification that the conduct is bad, and also remarking, apropos of nothing, that the law prohibits it, violates Grice's maxim of relevance. It also violates the structure of what you said, which was a quite clear statement that if the law does not prohibit collusion, that collusion cannot be bad.

I will happily license you to restrict my comment to the domain of collusion; I'm willing to believe that you did not intend your audience to infer "assassination is not bad unless it's illegal" from "collusion is not bad unless it's illegal". But we are discussing collusion, and everything I said applies there. The example I picked, antitrust law, is specifically related to it, and is even specifically the main topic of the post. So: if the US repealed all its antitrust laws, can I assume you would agree that any collusion formerly prohibited by them was now unobjectionable? If not, would you like to revise your comment?

Finally:

> Your disagreement on semantics is just plain wrong.

Compare to my comment, "I have to agree with the bare semantics here".

> If the law they broke is a "conspiracy" law, then the fundamental difference between what these companies did and what a union does is the "secret" part of a conspiracy.

There is no blanket "conspiracy" law in the US; it would violate the freedom of assembly. For conspiracy to be criminal conduct, the object of the conspiracy needs to be illegal. Therefore, the fundamental difference, as I pointed out before, is not that the companies acted secretly and unions act in the open. If the companies acted in the open, that would still be illegal. The question you're dismissing is, why?

Also, you made the implicit assumption that a corporation is like a human. It isn't, and you should not be using values of a human but apply it to a corporation.

A corp should be treated with more strict rules, to prevent it from becoming too powerful, because the collective mandate of a corporation is profit, and if it were to be judged as a human, would look like a high functioning sociopath hell bent on doing anything possible to make a buck. Therefore, it should not deserve the same rights as actual humans.

More precisely, he's asking what moral/political philosophy principle he can use to distinguish between corporations selling labor and corporations buying labor. Zedshaw suggested "the law says X" as the underlying principle which is a bit unsatisfying.

(It's unsatisfying because it implies that, e.g., Rosa Parks and similar individuals were in the wrong when they broke the law.)

The issue is not whether the collusion is public or private, and it is also not whether it benefits the rich or the poor.

The issue is that in general it is illegal to reduce competition by forming a cartel. People to it privately because it is illegal. The one exception for this is forming a cartel of sellers of labor, i.e. a union. Note that, if it were not a labor union, a cartel would be illegal even if it was benefiting poor people at the expense or big corporations.

A much better reason for allowing labor unions, is that unless they use physical force (which of course they do, all the time, but I am speaking theoretically here), they don't really create that much market power. People can always choose to work during a strike (again, assuming the union doesn't physically stop them, which is in theory illegal). If unions don't create market power, what is the point of them? I think they can be useful to help management to stick to long-term commitments they make to workers, and to provide an alternate way for workers to be represented in the company.

Once a union forms, you are legally forbidden from taking your business elsewhere.

That's a far stronger form of market power than what is alleged in this case - Apple and Google colluding certainly did not prevent Oracle or Salesforce from poaching their employees.

And the anti-collusion agreement only applied to employees working on collaborative projects anyway - i.e., Apple can't poach the Google guy working with Apple on iPhone/Gmail compatibility after they decide they like him. It never prevented Apple from grabbing someone working on Android internals.

Now if instead of it being contractors who joined together by incorporating, the candlemakers were employees who joined together by unionizing, why is this much different? And why do exclusivity deals legal in the incorporated case become illegal in the union case (the "closed shop", i.e. an agreement to only hire the union's members as candlemakers for some period of time)? They seem pretty analogous to me. The Candlemaker's Local 382 and Candlemaker's Inc. are doing pretty similar things: taking formerly individual candlemakers and joining them into a larger entity that markets its members' services jointly. They differ only in the precise arrangement by which the joined workers provide services to the purchaser: one is a union of employees who've joined together to sell their pooled candlemaking labor to the company, and the other a union of contractors who've joined together to sell their pooled candlemaking services to the company.

The place where the analogy to cartels works better for me is in large umbrella union organizations, like the AFL-CIO, if they coordinate their exercise of market power. But some of that is already illegal, e.g. secondary boycotts are illegal under U.S. law.

On the other hand, what the owner of the means of production/service risks is some profit lost -- how often do you really hear about healthy businesses getting killed by the workers' over the top demands? What happens most of the time is business owners and workers agree on some sort of compromise, after which owners go to their mansion to mourn the bigger mansion they could have had.

So it all comes at a cost. My Mother-in-law lived through the depression, and despised minimum wage. She was a wage-earner whos job was erased because it wasn't worth that much per hour. That left her out in the cold. She knew many people in that situation.

Its called the law of unintended consequences. Unions do - something. And that something benefits some and hurts others. And some of the ones it benefits (union bosses) go home to their mansion to mourn the bigger mansion they could have had.

Of course, for that to happen, a system does exist to help people whose labor isn't valuable enough to acquire education or skills necessary to produce more valuable labor. The social system basically takes care of that, paying for education/retraining/apprenticeships, and if necessary covering basic living expenses (rent/food/childcare/etc.) while it's in progress. That can sometimes be done via apprenticeships/internships in the private sector, but with more oversight that they are legitimately training.

So what happens to the $5/hr jobs? If they were really training-type jobs, not much: previously the employer was paying a small wage and the government was basically subsidizing the person's living (because the wage was insufficient to live on), and now that arrangement has just been formalized by making the person be part of a subsidized apprenticeship/training program in which the company pays below-minimum wage and the government contributes the rest.

If it's just a regular job, then if demand is relatively inelastic, and the job is hard to automate, you just pay them more, and the world doesn't really collapse. In effect some money gets redistributed towards lower-wage workers from elsewhere in the economy. If the jobs are easy to automate and worth automating, on the other hand, you just automate them. This is generally good for technological progress, because it pushes the country further ahead on the automation curve. Something that might make economic sense to automate in 2025 elsewhere could be worth automating by 2020 here, because the technology companies don't have to compete with super-cheap labor. It's hard to advance robotics when a human is willing to steal the robot's job by working for a pittance! And contra the Luddites, generally this process improves the quality of jobs available: automating jobs out of existence produces better tech jobs to replace them. Plus, it's going to happen anyway, so might as well speed up the process up by a few years and get out in front of it. One way to do that is to subsidize R&D or pay for trial deployments of new technology, but another way is to just put a price floor on human labor, to discourage the use of legacy manual labor for tasks that should be automatable.

And if the job isn't worth doing at all with either $20/hr labor or however much it'd cost to have machines do it, then it apparently wasn't very valuable! So just do something else instead and no great loss.

I advise against glib answers about ruining peoples lives.

Historically unions were conspiracies until the late 1800s.

The theory is that this is in the public's best interests.

So, in theory, if you have two giant companies that control 95% of the distribution of widgets, you might decide that they cannot merge into one entity. But if widgets are made by a bunch of tiny independents and sold to those two distributors, you might allow the independents to form a co-operative association.

In practice, lawyers and lobbyists will say and do anything to get an advantage for their clients. But that's the theory, and that's why it's generally easier to form a union than it is to form a cartel.

Is there some arbitrary pre-specified list/heirarchy of little guys that must be taken as a first principle, or is there an underlying principle determining who is the little guy?

Or you can cop out and say that since there is no perfect way to write a law relating to this, there should be no law. Which is effectively the law of the jungle. Some people prefer that.

You might as well just say "I use my judgement" as a (non-)answer to his original question.

Your suggestion that people asking for a (moral/political) philosophical justification of a law is a "cop-out" is simply anti-intellectual. You might not carefully think through your views, but some of us (i.e. crazygringo) at least try to. I know the idea is a little threatening (you run the risk of discovering your views are wrong, omfg!) and suggests possible tribal disloyalty, but please recognize that crazygringo basically agrees with you [1] and is just trying to understand intellectually why.

[1] I'm interpreting this from the first and last lines of his post.

I'm ok with you disagreeing with me and/or insulting me for not playing the society game by your rules.

I've discovered that I learn far more when I treat questions I have no answer for as an opportunity to learn than when I treat it as an insult and a straw man argument.

(More pragmatically, try to estimate who really has the power in a situation; who has other options? Who is dependant on whom? Remember that a company is not a person and does not have physical or emotional needs.)

I find it interesting that this would justify a union that represented 1000's of workers, working in just 1 or 2 companies.

But that it would not justify a kind of hypothetical 'union of CEO's' of 100's of workers, working in 100's of companies.

Which makes sense, of course.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action

So it is with all organizations, such as unions, trade groups, etc.

Very simple game theory.

2) Power imbalance. Others have addressed this already, so I'll let it lie.

3) This agreement in particular was an attempt to create and abuse a monopsony position, which is in itself illegal. Many markets are regulated in order to ensure competition, by e.g. blocking mergers. Secret negotiations are often an attempt to bypass pro-competition regulations, by having two entities act in concert while pretending to be independent. In short, ends matter. Collusion to commit a crime is viewed differently than collusion to ask for a raise or collusion to not by a product.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_labor_law#Workpla...

It's totally fair that they also (i) discuss why the law may have to come to be and (ii) how they think/feel about it.

Do you believe that businesses should have the same legal status as individuals? There's been a tiff over that for the last decade or so.

The difference boils down to what the purpose of laws are. Ultimately they exist to sustain a reasonably egalitarian free society. Obviously there are times and specific situations where we deviate more or less from the "ideal" society but the law shepherds us back toward an agreed-upon path.

Basically the root of antitrust law is that concentration of power is anti-democratic and therefore must be controlled. In a situation of people colluding around work standards, there is a parallel to some extent but there isn't a clear power-player who emerges (except for the "Union" itself but that's made up of all the employees in a different way than the corporation is owned by its owners because individuals in a union are all essentially equally important to the union's strength, where in corporate ownership it's very clear that some individuals wield significantly (orders of magnitude) more power through wealth and control.

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1239985?uid=3739560&ui...

(E.g.) A Google employee sends his/her resume to Apple, then Apple tells Google that said employee is looking for work elsewhere.

Unions aim to redress that imbalance, and there are specific laws in many countries detailing what they can/cannot do.

IANAL but AFAIK there are fewer and less strong cases where companies can legally collude in most jurisdictions.

A couple of personal thoughts:

- The impact of unions is different in different situations. It's easy for us to pick and choose examples based on pre-existing biases, but the details are more nuanced.

- People often think of unions as being for low-skilled workers, or those where the choice of employers is limited (e.g. teachers in the UK). However, many professional guilds (like national doctors' associations) also provide many of the same functions (lobbying, collective bargaining, coordination of industrial actions, ...).

A cartel is several companies colluding to raise prices above/below the market price.

A labor union might be though of in the same way, but in practice is is very hard for a union to really control the supply of labor, because it is made up of thousands of people. It is only when they are tacitly allowed to use force/violence that unions can effectively prevent strike-breakers.

So given how ineffective they are at permanently raising wages (perhaps they raise wages a bit, but not nearly as much as if they had a true monopoly), unions should probably be allowed since if people choose to join them, they must provide some other benefits, such as representing individual workers with grievances, etc.

Employers have a natural organizational advantage, as well as advantages of capital and resources. Given that virtually any workplace has a 1:n relationship with its employees, the bargaining advantage is with the employer. Within a labor market as a whole, a small number of companies may affect a huge number of workers (the case lists a handful of firms and 60,000 or more employees).

This was recognized by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations:

It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily: and the law, besides, authorises, or at least does not prohibit, their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work, but many against combining to raise it. In all such disputes, the masters can hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, or merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks, which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year, without employment. In the long run, the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him; but the necessity is not so immediate.

We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform, combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. To violate this combination is everywhere a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals. We seldom, indeed, hear of this combination, because it is the usual, and, one may say, the natural state of things, which nobody ever hears of. Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate. These are always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy till the moment of execution; and when the workmen yield, as they sometimes do without resistance, though severely felt by them, they are never heard of by other people.

And on for a number of paragraphs.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3300/3300-h/3300-h.htm#link2H...

Chapters VII and X of book 1 discuss labour, wages, and various differentiators among them. They're impressively comprehensive and informed, vastly more liberal than you might have been lead to believe of Smith (he really is quite the liberal philosopher), and still highly applicable today. I strongly recommend reading both sections, and more of Smith if at all possible.

As you grow older, you realize what the world really is and how vulnerable we really are.

On that note, "Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs threatened to hit Palm with patent litigation if the company did not stop poaching valuable employees"[1] is not ethically defensible.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/01/angry-over-employee-poa...

employers have no duty, but that of making profit. Don't misplace your loyalty, because employers certainly don't place theirs in you (the emoployee).

One thing I have always wondered is if the raises Google employees received in 2011 were a result of the illegal collusion being uncovered and therefore no longer depressing salaries. The timing seems about right.

For reference: http://www.businessinsider.com/google-bonus-and-raise-2010-1...

(It was much more than 10% by the way, and by far the biggest raise I've ever received in my career)

It's beyond dispute that the raises were given for competitive reasons. (No, we didn't all get a raise because we were doing such a great job.) There was an uptick in Googlers leaving.

I suppose some of it had to do with Facebook, which was NOT part of the collusion. But I wonder how related the two events are, and if this issue will come up in a future class action lawsuit.

It's a pretty unprecedented event to give all employees at an enormous company such a big raise. A sudden shift in the job market caused by this defunct agreement could explain it.

It's trivial to prove this is going on, but what I mean is: difficult to reach the legal burden of proof of collusion.

Also ultimately a law suit like this will send $$$ -> lawyers more than anyone else.

Not when the DOJ has subpoena power.

After a Google recruiter reached out to an Apple engineer, Steve Jobs in an email to Eric Schmidt:

    "I would be very pleased if your recruiting department would
    stop doing this,"

    "Can you get this stopped and let me know why this is happening?"

    "[The recruiter who contacted the Apple Employee] will be terminated within
    the hour."

    "Please extend my apologies as appropriate to Steve Jobs."

Just saying....

We get paid so much because we produce that much value. But if these allegations are true, we aren't getting paid enough.

Also, I bet bank & oil execs believe they make the world-go-round and add a lot of value too. After all, banks & oil touches pretty much all our lives as much as computers do, right?

But that would involve hiring different people (who would probably demand higher salaries), not paying existing teachers more.

The fact is that some people are more valuable than others. Not in an existential sense, but in the sense of how much their labor is worth the market.

Senior management are a special case. I think many of them are people with exceptional ability, but it is harder to argue that their wages are "market wages" because they tend to determine their own salaries. There are many market frictions that are particular to the shareholder-manager relationship. These might potentially allow senior management to extract "economic rent" i.e. wages that are beyond the value they produce.

Well, it varies by region. There are some areas where teachers get $1,000/day compensation packages. But they don't really earn that money, they just use state violence to take it from people who earned it.

Teachers work about 186 days a year, so the magic number we have to get to is $186K.

Let's say the high school gym teacher. Late 30s, been there for 15 years. Base salary, $125K.

Health benefit package worth $18K a year. Pension benefits worth maybe $40K a year.

He also gets $7K in SS taxes paid, and other assorted taxes we'll ignore.

125+18+40+7 = $190k

(I suppose to be fair we must deduct union dues from the total. I have no idea how much union dues are.)

Professional athletes are unionized. They would be earning much less money if they weren't.

Then you write "it's hard to find examples of high wage workers who aren't in some sense unionized."

And then you again add something completely contradictory.

But I do agree with you. I would say that tech workers are underpaid. Google has revenue per employee of $931,565. Most of that is profit. Is the average compensation per Googler anywhere near that?

Why shouldn't Googlers form a union and take lets say an average $500,000 per employee? Right now, Googlers get paid free-market wages that are a fraction of the value they add to the company.

When you brought up unions, I pointed out that since tech workers have less market power than doctors and lawyers, they are actually underpaid relative to these groups.

To clarify: I think that doctors and lawyers would still be highly paid if they had no market power, because their skills/abilities are valuable.

So my point of view is that market wages are in accordance to the value that people produce, but people can sometimes obtain more by having market power (or less, if the employers have market power). It seems that you think higher wages only come from market power.

On a union for Googlers, what would stop someone else from joining Google and not joining the union, in exchange for better pay/conditions in the short term.

"c. colloq. Used to indicate that some (freq. conventional) metaphorical or hyperbolical expression is to be taken in the strongest admissible sense: ‘virtually, as good as’; (also) ‘completely, utterly, absolutely’. Now one of the most common uses, although often considered irregular in standard English since it reverses the original sense of literally (‘not figuratively or metaphorically’)."

Of note the use by Twain: "1876 ‘M. Twain’ Adventures Tom Sawyer ii. 20 And when the middle of the afternoon came, from being a poor poverty-stricken boy in the morning, Tom was literally rolling in wealth."

You may not like this situation but it is way too late to complain about it.

Compare to how much you pay for a lawyer per hour. And lawyer do not have to train on the this years tech over and over. And they don't have to think hard for full day.

You've just described collusion. They colluded to prevent the wages of their top talent from being boosted by the normal process of competition in the labor market. Sure it's not like they stole money directly out of their star employees' pockets, but in the end the effect was the same.