Common leadership, via the sharing of board members, significantly increased the likelihood that tech firms would not hire each others' workers. This form of 'no-poaching' may have had much bigger impacts on wage suppression:
"It is worth noting that such collusion against workers may have costs beyond just the directly impacted workers in the high-tech sector. Wages and salaries of jobs in one industry can serve as reference points when workers in other firms/industries negotiate their wages. Thus, if high-tech workers get paid less, this may impact wages of other workers, say in finance, which may then impact wages in another sector and so on. Collusion in one sector can have impacts on other industries."
To read more: https://www.nominalnews.com/p/competition-no-poaching-real-p...
As an extension: an opposite of "collusion through common leadership" might be "collusion enabled by common exclusion"; in other words, blacklisting.
The inverse of a "no-poach list" would be a "no-hire list".
In the past, blacklisting (now should be called denylisting) was a real labor issue. People who stood up for workers rights (think: coal-mining towns in the late 1wr800s) or had unpopular political views (think: Hollywood in the early cold war) were, so the story goes, put on shared lists and denied work.
But the effect would be similar. Enabled beneficial collective action for the executive class, through a concerted and curated collection of who can participates in working together.
Does tech do this, too? If so, it could explain the need to import labor, and reflect or contribute to an artificial inability to find high-tech labor domestically?
That is-- some of the collusion enabled by "common leadership" might not be possible with a workforce having full agency--but, with the risk of blacklisting, basically, there is potentially another side to the collective action of the executive minority.
Of course, blacklisting might be illegal, so, hard to learn about, but so might be some other other forms of collusion, which the paper talks about?
I am not a lawyer, just wondering if this is part of a bigger workforce pattern, reaching further to the lower rungs of the ladder, too, even if in the inverse form (exclusion, not inclusion).
Links:
- https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/blacklists/
- https://pen.org/censored-free-speech-hollywood/One of the pieces of advice I would give to someone early in your career is to find a trusted seasoned executive who can share a perspective that I have never seen captured well in writing. Typical actual comp structures for a number of career paths. Board dynamics. The true sources of negotiating power. The types of restrictive terms included in exec and board contracts. etc.
One of the companies I worked at had the no poach list on the company open confluence for anyone to see if they looked
Marx predicted this. But he usually does.
This is talking about High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation form the aughts.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust...
Also, in retrospect, this timing was funny. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2009/08/03Dr-Eric-Schmidt-Res...