Silicon Valley's Shocking Collusion: Inside One of the Largest Wage Theft Trials in American History

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/corporate-accountability-and-workplace/silicon-valleys-techtopus-inside-one-largest-wage-theft

One of the largest wage theft cases in American history was settled last Thursday, with the terms of the agreement kept secret. The companies involved include some of America's largest tech titans, including Apple, Intel, Adobe and Google. For years, in essence, the companies had agreed not to recruit employees from one another as a way of keeping labor costs down: Less recruitment equals less a less competitive job market and depressed wages.

The agreement affected the wages of hundreds of thousands of tech workers, amounting to an estimated $9 billion in the later half of the 2000s. The documents that came out in the discovery process of the class-action lawsuit are loaded with smoking guns; in one damning email thread after another, emails from big CEOs like Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt make it clear that they were consciously engaged in keeping down Silicon Valley labor costs. Court documents describe it as an "overarching conspiracy,” violating the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Clayton Antitrust Act.

What the documents reveal is nothing like the "free market," innovation-based dogma we've heard from Silicon Valley for decades now, but the same old industrial patterns: power players running the companies colluding with each other to protect their profit margins, with the price of labor paramount focus.

Mark Ames, who is my longtime friend and collaborator, was the first to recognize the importance of the case, and wrote a number of stories about the emails for Pando Daily, where he is the senior investigative reporter. The stories are filled with lurid details, from Eric Schmidt conveying to his team at Google that eBay CEO Meg Whitman had been complaining about Google's recruiting efforts, to revelations that Google begged Steve Jobs for permission to hire one of his trusted talents, only to be rejected by Jobs. As Ames wrote, "For all of the high-minded talk of post-industrial technotopia and Silicon Valley as worker’s paradise, what we see here in stark ugly detail is how the same old world scams and rules are still operative." [Read the archive of Ames' wage-theft cartel coverage here.]

[AngryAmish]

1. These are the same people pushing immigration reform.

[Lasher]

2. I am disappointed to see that terms of the agreement will be kept secret.

This attitude is prevalent across corporate America. As I think of these free-agent CEOs with their runaway 'earnings' and their complicit BODs, I am reminded of the times I've been told my own wages and benefits were being reduced while my workload increased.

The HR propaganda ministers liked to say they were making our compensation more "competitive" in corporate jargon. I have no doubt my own employer was engaging at the time in similar practices to ensure the job market was not competitive. The hypocrisy is epic.

[bemildred]

3. Thats why unions have to be big, to speak to these weasels in a language they can understand. nt

[xchrom]

4. + a gazillion. nt

[malaise]

5. 100% correct

[myrna minx]

6. Correct.