The uber-rich have been speaking to us with a forked tongue, decrying “taxing the job creators” while secretly colluding to suppress the pay of non-executives, and placing no bounds on the allowable greed of the executive class.
Mark Gibbs, esteemed columnist with NetworkWorld, about made me vomit with this:
Consider, for example, the recent revelations that a handful of major Silicon Valley firms — Adobe, Apple, Disney Pixar, Google, Intel, Intuit, Genentech, and Lucasfilm — conspired to limit the salaries of their top employees.
No, not the salaries of the top executives … d’oh, that’ll never happen. No, I mean the salaries of senior technical people; the people creating core systems and software. ….
Now, it’s not as if this kind of collusion is something new. Oh no, these guys had been caught doing this kind of stuff before. In 2010 the Department of Justice settled with Apple Google, Adobe, Pixar, Intel, and Intuit over a deal that essentially added up to a “no poaching” agreement. The companies had agreed to not cold call each other’s staff with employment offers. And that agreement went back at least as far as 2005! ….
[J]ustice doesn’t apply to corporations such as Google, Apple, Pixar, et al. Nope, they’re pretty much saying the same thing: “Yep, we did it but we’re so big, you can’t do much about it.” And they’re adding silently, “neener, neener, neener.” ….
And if and when the new suit is settled how much compensation will all of those employees shortchanged by the collusion get? My bet is none or damn close to none.
(http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/2011/052311-backspin.html)
Now see The Register’s story “Adobe, Apple, Google hit by wage-fixing case”
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/05/apple_google_intel_sued/):
Six of Silicon Valley’s largest companies have been named in a class action suit seeking compensation for anti-competitive employment practices to which the companies have already admitted.
Late last year the Department of Justice reached a settlement with Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, and Pixar to stop them continuing their “anti-competitive employee solicitation agreements”.
The secret deals dated back to 2005: senior executives at all six firms agreed not to poach each others’ staff and not to cold-call. The DoJ ruled this was anti-competitive and to the detriment of employees.
A class action case has been brought by Siddharth Hariharan, a software engineer who worked at LucasFilm from 2007 to 2008.
The case claims that Pixar and LucasFilm had three agreements on recruitment practices. Firstly, the two firms agreed not to cold-call. Secondly, if someone from Pixar applied for a job at LucasFilm, then LucasFilm would inform Pixar. And thirdly if either firm made a job offer, the rival company would not try to better that offer.
This is “collusion,” or in other venues “criminal conspiracy.” And this is overt evidence that there really IS class warfare going on: and the Greedy Rich (I don’t mean all rich people, just the Greedy Rich) are conspiring to keep the pay of working people down, enabling the thin, thin layer of Greedy Rich to sock away mega-multi-millions of dollars.
Gee, it’s nice to be clear about this.