Revealed: Apple and Google’s wage-fixing cartel involved dozens more companies, over one million employees | PandoDaily
"Confidential internal Google and Apple memos, buried within piles of
court dockets and reviewed by PandoDaily, clearly show that what began
as a secret cartel agreement between Apple’s Steve Jobs and Google’s
Eric Schmidt to illegally fix the labor market for hi-tech workers,
expanded within a few years to include companies ranging from Dell, IBM,
eBay and Microsoft, to Comcast, Clear Channel, Dreamworks, and
London-based public relations behemoth WPP. All told, the combined
workforces of the companies involved totals well over a million
employees."
"Although the Department ultimately decided to focus its attention on
just Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Lucasfilm and Pixar, the
emails and memos clearly name dozens more companies which, at least as
far as Google and Apple executives were concerned, formed part of their
wage-fixing cartel."
..
"The “effective date” of Google’s first wage-fixing agreements, early
March 2005, follows a few weeks after Steve Jobs threatened Google’s
Sergey Brin to stop all recruiting at Apple: “if you hire a single one
of these people,” Jobs emailed Brin, “that means war.”
Jobs threatened Brin and Google on February 17, 2005; nine days
later, Apple’s VP for Human Resources sent out an internal email to
Apple recruiting,
All,
Please add Google to your “hands-off” list. We recently agreed not to
recruit from one another so if you hear of any recruiting they are
doing against us, please be sure to let me know.
Please also be sure to honor our side of the deal."
"This is just a tiny sample of the “overwhelming” evidence used by
both the Justice Department’s antitrust division, and the District Court
judge in San Jose, to debunk the company executives’ claims that each
had coincidentally implemented identical non-solicitation policies at
the same time, with the same companies, without knowing what the other
side was doing.
From that point on, the secret cartel expanded. Later that year, in
September 2005, eBay CEO Meg Whitman called Schmidt complaining that
Google’s recruiters were hurting profits and business at eBay. Schmidt
emailed Google’s “Executive Management Committee”—the company’s top
executives— summarizing Whitman’s, and “the valley”’s view that
competing for workers by offering higher pay packages was “unfair”:
"Within weeks of Whitman’s call to Schmidt, eBay was placed on a Google
list of “Sensitive” companies, for whom Google placed fewer restrictions
on its recruiters except at the executive recruitment level. It was at
this time that Google began to internally formalize its illegal
wage-suppression pacts—and Schmidt was clearly worried about getting
caught."
"Schmidt was then asked if Google sales executive Omid Kordestani could share “with Ebay/PP the rules as they pertain to them?”
Schmidt responded:
“I would prefer that Omid do it verbally since I don’t
want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later? Not sure
about this.. thanks Eric”
Google’s HR head at the time, Shona Brown, agreed with her boss, in lower-case ee cummings syntax:
“makes sense to do orally. i agree.”
A year later, by the end of 2006, Google upgraded eBay to its “Do Not
Cold Call” list, joining OpenTV, Nvidia Technologies, and Intuit along
with the original five companies."
...
"For now, it’s enough to try to absorb what all of these
cross-company, cross-industry secret labor-fixing agreements mean. Most
labor stories about wage theft and corporate abuse tend to focus on
low-wage earners and the most disadvantaged. Certainly it strains one’s
sensibilities to compare an exploited low-wage worker in the fast food
or retail industry to tech engineers and programmers, who are far better
compensated, live more comfortably, and rarely worry about putting food
in their children’s mouths.
In terms of pathos, there is no comparison; minimum wage earners are
struggling to survive, and nearly all of the well-educated,
privileged-born people in the media world agree that tech industry
workers are all a bunch of overpaid misogynist libertarian bros, a
caricature
that makes it perfectly fine to hate the entire class, and impossible
to consider them as political comrades stuck in the same predicament as
the rest of the non-multimillionaires in this country.
What’s more important is the political predicament that low-paid fast
food workers share with well-paid hi-tech workers: the loss of power
over their lives and their futures to the growing mass of concentrated
power in Silicon Valley, whose tentacles are so strong now and so great,
that hundreds of thousands of workers around the globe—public relations
and cable company employees in the British Isles, programmers and tech
engineers in Russia and China (according to other documents which I’ll
write about soon)—have their lives controlled and their wages and
opportunities stolen from them without ever knowing about it, all the
while being bombarded with cultural cant about the wisdom of the free
market, about the efficiency of free knowledge, about the need to take
personal responsibility and to blame no one but yourself for everything
that happens in your life and your career."
