Yes. Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay.
Apple's involvement was particularly egregious: they threatened to destroy adobe with spurious patent litigation unless they participated. Google executives also explicitly acknowledged that there actions were illegal and directed staff to keep discussions about it out of email.
The companies basically got a slap on the wrist: the settlement was a tiny fraction of direct saving the cartel members enjoyed from wage fixing. Almost no incentive to not do it again, just next time don't leave emails explicitly acknowledging your criminal activities.
Their actions didn't just hurt their own employees, they depressed wages industry wide. After the scheme stopped these companies reset their pay scales. I got a substantial increase in pay even though I was not working for a participating company and worked on the clear other side of the country (I worked for a company HQed in Sunnyvale and who heavily competed in that job market).
> Apple's involvement was particularly egregious: they threatened to destroy adobe with spurious patent litigation unless they participated.
My impression (from the emails that were quoted in the news at the time) was that Steve Jobs was the driving force behind it. All the other participants seemed to just go along with it. Still wrong, but I doubt it would have happened without Jobs pushing it.
Yes, and the penalties they faced for their illegal behavior were terribly low. They were almost even lower, but the judge threw out the original settlement.
It's astounding to me that people would continue to want to work there, given that it is now public knowledge that Google will try to cheat you out of wages.
I don't understand why this is wrong but labor unions are encouraged. If the sellers of labor can cartelize to maximize income, why shouldn't the buyers of labor be able to cartelize to minimize expenses? There is no logically consistent excuse.
Better yet, why isn't all cartelization prohibited?
I mean, isn't that (one of) the point(s) of the corporation as a legal entity: to allow people with capital assets and a joint enterprise in mind to coordinate their resources and act as a single entity for the purposes of pursuing that enterprise [edit: which of course includes purchasing labor in all but the smallest undertakings]. One of the original motivating theories behind the drive for labor unions organized within companies (rather than earlier forms of labor organization like guilds and professional societies which predate modern economies) was that the unification of capital interests within a company necessitated that labor similarly unify, since the alternative would be that the individual seller of labour would lack any kind of bargaining power when negotiating with their employer.
Unless we abolish corporations as a concept, how exactly do you effectively propose that we "outlaw all cartelization" in a way that isn't just outlawing unions while keeping capital interests unified?
tl;dr: unions complement the inherrent concentration of capital interests in modern ecconomies and are no more inherently like cartels than the corporate form itself.
I mean "anti-competitive behaviour" are words with meaning in the context of society. And no, unionisation is _not_ "anti-competitive behaviour" in any legal sense.
You don't have to write some sort of universal program that can take a textual description of a situation and spit out "guilty/not guilty". You can make laws stating a thing, which a bunch of motivating text, and then direct prosecution against things that are against the spirit of the thing, and get judges to follow it (either through rulings, or if that fails, adding extra laws to make it even clearer what is up).
It's a social thing, not a logical contradiction gotcha. "Corporations may not engage in anti-competitive behaviour. Corporations who act as such shall be liable under anti-trust statues as if they operated as one. Also, price-fixing is not allowed." Then society and the rest fills in the blanks
IIRC a group of people had to be given permission to 'incorporate' under a charter with clear production objective(end condition) until mid-late the 19th century
