The whole aftermath of this wage-fixing scandal was just a slap on the wrist. The amount they paid in fines and settlements was less than the amount of money they saved by suppressing wages.
This seems to me to be a problem with the existing justice system.
Businesses which are caught doing something dodgy pay - at most - the amount they would have had to pay to obey the law. And the chance of being caught is not exactly high.
When deciding whether to do the right thing or not, the formula is (amount you save from breaking the law) - (cost of getting caught) * (chance of getting caught)).
If "cost of getting caught" is always less than "amount you save from breaking the law", then there's no reason to behave honestly. In fact, this causes the "market" to select against corporations run by honest people, because they're at a competitive disadvantage.
I mostly agree with your point, but not with the mathematics:
Your formula gives you positive Expected Value but there are many situations that are +EV which you shouldn't choose to visit.
Even if the penalty was more than you were saving (or if the penalty hit nominally responsible individuals), even if the chance were fairly low, that could act as a significant deterrant to unethical practices.
Situation: "ooh should I talk to my actuary/lawyer/partner about this difficult unethical decision? Arg but that would leave a paper trail."
One example: Mark Zuckerberg cheating Eduardo Saverin out of his FaceBook shares. He realized that it was cheaper in the long-run to cheat him, because he knew that the eventual lawsuit settlement would be less than Eduardo Saverin would have gotten if he were treated fairly.
Actually, if you talk about it with your lawyer, attorney-client privilege protects you. Just make sure you do it in person and aren't dumb enough to do it by E-Mail.
I wonder if, barbaric as it sounds, introducing more non-monetary punishments for corporate crimes would help with this. If CEOs of price-fixing companies were punished by public flogging or other pain-based punishments, something outside the normal money-based calculus...
Though I suppose the chances of something like that would be even less than such folks seeing jail time, which would also be a non-financial punishment.
The fix is to make individuals in the company, e.g. the directors, personally responsible. In many countries the legal framework is already in place for that.
As long as the fines are only coming from the company the only one you're really punishing are the shareholders who really have no control over the company's day to day activities and these decisions. They have no visibility into this either.
The CEO should be held responsible for any illegal activities the company undertakes under his direction as should the directors. Assuming they're aware of it. Otherwise the responsibility is probably at some lower level. This does not contradict the responsibility of the company as a legal entity which is a party to these contract.
EDIT: A decision that may cost the company 100M in fines in 10 years and help the CEO make his bonus this year is a no brainer. This is not unlike deciding to do share buybacks when you hold stock options...
There's no reason for barbarism. If the situation needs to be fixed then a change needs to happen one way or another (someone else pointed out a settlement amount hasn't been decided yet).
For this context a financial punishment is appropriate ("punishment should fit the crime"). And the existence of the formula above is actually helpful. It makes it simple to figure out exactly what the punishment amount should be, whereas flogging as a deterrent is a tad harder to measure, and as you point out, is barbaric.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. I think the best way to solve this is three things; entrepreneurs building real businesses, unions in the established companies, and switching jobs periodically. As a collective culture, we've chosen the easy way and overtime it gets worse without these checks and balances within the corporate world.
Unions are directly contrary to the freedom and flexibility of switching jobs. They tie your pay to how many years you've worked at a company, not how skilled you are.
I'd rather have my wage fixed by a corporation than a union. At least corporations value skill.
I disagree with you. Unions are a way to balance the corporate power. I understand unions can become corrupt but there are ways to battle corruption on both sides. If the unions decide to be corrupt? Well, tank the business. I understand this isn't ideal but it opens up discussions. Demands for higher productivity is a management desire. Demands for better work-life is a worker desire. There is room for both sides to win. Letting management have free reign is more evil than the counter.
Those unique skills did not protect them from being abused by Oracle, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, Intel or any others.
Either you believe many companies abuse their employees with no real consequences or you don't. If you believe the former then avoiding the solution because it is contrary to your ideology is never going to fix anything.
Because empirically it would not be. There is a great deal of mis-information about them from right leaning media that might create the contrary impression:
That they limit wages, but the screen actor's guild certainly doesn't cap actor's wages.
That they limit outside work, but for example, state employed court reporters do all their transcripts outside working hours and make quite a bit not being paid hourly for that.
Indeed they have protected pilot wages for decades beyond what would have been possible otherwise.
There is no case where an effective professional organization of some sort doesn't make things better for it members. To suppose that you as an individual will ever have any hope of negotiating on an equal basis with a multibillion dollar company because of "market forces" hand waving is utterly unreasonable and the poster child of limiting yourself due to ideology. Your one and only protection right now are few pieces of rapidly diminishing legislation.
For better or worse you live in a society where if you don't have a lobbyist you are invisible and where what is considered bribery in every other country (ie money in politics) is considered free speech. A lobbyist alone would work wonders let alone the other advantages of an organization.
Confirmation bias mean that exceptional or confirmatory anecdotes are much more likely to be remembered[1]
I continue to be amazed that there armies of people who consider sentences that begin with "I know someone who..." to somehow be definitive evidence of anything whatsoever.
I continue to be amazed by people who criticise anecdotal evidence as an ad hominem or straw man attack without providing any kind of evidence of anything you have said.
We are talking about benefits for people, we are not talking about abstract mathematics - you don't want to accept the situation of those people because that would be inconvenient for you, considering what you have said.
Constructive discussion is now over; you failed to convince me.
You don't need a blue collar union patterned after UAW, but there have been multiple successful lawsuits about illegal wage suppression across many areas of high tech. They are probably the tip of an iceberg. These lawsuits suggest a much deeper pattern of high level collusion between these incestuous companies to systematically depress wages.
There are professional organizations for every major profession. Technically, the ACM would probably be the closest thing to a union that programmers actually need, but it's limited to the big iron scientific computing... So, yeah. I don't know if there is something for all of the webdev 2.0 gluelib writers out there.
Except for actually discovering those secret agreements, what policies do you see an union instituting that would ameliorate that problem? I see how unions can help set minimum wages and conditions for their members, but that's not what we're talking about here.
Collective bargaining for better wages and working conditions is part of what got us a step up from the world described in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. It took 30 years, but did you expect it to get fixed quickly and easily? Politics is a lifetime grudge match. The Capitalists you sell your labor to, ideally, want you to work for free with perfect efficiency 24/7/365. That's why they are replacing workers with robots.
Anyway, a professional organization will give you more far flung networking opportunities as well as intelligence on what's going on at other firms, which will increase your value as a worker, and presumably, your pay.
Bullshit. I can believe that programmers have unique skills, and also believe that companies don't give a shit about that, and largely try to treat them like replaceable parts.
Even having unique skills is not enough. People can still take advantage of you if you aren't career- or business-savvy enough.
This is a complex environment, not simply a question of being special snowflake 10X programmer or whatever. "Oh, you're skilled, Jimmy. You get the job done. But see, Jimmy; you are not a team player. We've been having a lot of work to do lately, and you are not putting in the extra effort by staying late enough, Jimmy. You see, Pete, now that's a guy that goes the extra mile! And there are plenty of others. Frankly, you should try and put in just a little more effort (because you're easily replaceable, Jimmy)".
What good does it do to be a "10X Ninja" if you feel like a small fish in a big pond with no bargaining chips?
I don't really see what the benefit for Jimmy to stay in that situation is. If Jimmy is skilled, and the company thinks or acts like Jimmy is replaceable, then Jimmy is in a bad job. Jimmy should leave before Jimmy is mentally harmed.
I believe this to the extent that I think creating a union to protect people in that type of situation is a net negative, where the union acts to help keep people in that type of job, where the union acts like those people are replaceable parts, which ends up being to the benefit mainly of that type of employer: as those workers indeed become replaceable parts.
We should encourage those skilled workers to leave instead, by offering them something better.
> I don't really see what the benefit for Jimmy to stay in that situation is. If Jimmy is skilled, and the company thinks or acts like Jimmy is replaceable, then Jimmy is in a bad job. Jimmy should leave before Jimmy is mentally harmed.
You are assuming a perfectly rational actor. And with perfect information - we tend to suck up and endure a lot of shit if we just think it is "normal".
Isn't that a bit like saying "if you want to change politics, go for it, it is your political parties". There is so much entrenched interests in most of these structures that it is really hard changing them. You could start a new one, but it is quite a lot of work.
Yes, changing any preexisting system requires effort. It requires more than showing up one day and saying, "Here are my ideas, they are better than what you do, everyone do what I say now."
That doesn't mean it's impossible, just that it requires skills and efforts that us technical types often aren't very good at--listening to people, understanding their motivations, and looking for common ground and compromises. Then acting on that persuasively, to get people to go along with your ideas.
It's tough. Impossible? Absolutely not. It can be done.
But the point is that, right now, there's no such obstacle to overcome; saying that "it's not impossible" is exactly not an argument in favor of introducing unions.
Well, yes, and the workers in the tech industry continue to suffer from a lack of the benefits unions bring, including better pay and protection against being fired capriciously.
Remember the Adria Richards thing, how some guy lost his job? Having a union-back disciplinary process in place would have put a stop to that, you know.
I do remember the Adria Richards thing, but as far as I know, it's not exactly a widespread issue in the industry.
Regarding pay, it's not clear to me that it would solve the capping/fixing issue. Even with the no-poaching agreement, developer salaries are usually pretty high in those companies (especially for employees worthy of being poached). Would union rates really be higher than what they're already getting? I doubt it.
I'm not sure how what you believe has much bearing on this situation.
And I see no theoretical reason why union rules would necessarily do what you say--that is, why they would necessarily remove your ability to get better pay based on that thing you said is not generalizable or quantifiable anyway.
After all, we have one good real-world example that does what you're going for, the Screen Actors Guild. I assure you that A-list actors command a great deal more pay than your run-of-the-mill SAG member.
Why wouldn't something like that apply to the tech industry, as well?
"They tie your pay to how many years you've worked at a company, not how skilled you are"
There's nothing inherent about unions that makes this true. It's that it worked for many of the low-skill job unions. Nothing says this has to be true for a tech union.
"At least corporations value skill."
No they don't. They value paying the least possible amount for the most possible work.
Interesting that this doesn't apply to engineers, only product, sales, and g&a. Why is that? I have heard arguments that engineering salaries are likewise kept low through collusion but this wouldn't provide any evidence for that unless there's another such agreement for engineers.
Do product and sales typically make more money than devs? Or are they in shorter supply than engineers hence the desire to keep churn low for those positions?
In my experience, Sales folks make sometimes more than double what engineers make. Glassdoor has more information about salaries for different positions, do yourself a favor and check it out.
Nothing interesting is happening, so there isn't anything for any press to report.
There were motions to seal things, and rulings on those. There have been meetings between the attorneys for both sides and the court to work out issues of case management, and rulings from the court on case management issues.
Oracle filed a motion asking to dismiss on two grounds: (1) if everything the plaintiff alleges is true, it does not amount to the crimes Oracle is accused of committing, and (2) the plaintiff waited too long to file, and has run into a statute of limitations problem. A ruling on this issued 2015-04-22, and is probably the most interesting development since the case was files.
Oracle lost on the first part of their motion. If all plaintiff allegations were proven true, they would constitute the crime plaintiff alleges, according to the court.
Oracle won on the second part of their motion. The alleged acts in their filing were long enough ago that the statute of limitations applies. The court gave the plaintiff 30 days to amend the complaint to fix this. If plaintiff fails to do so, the case will be dismissed with prejudice. (Dismissal with prejudice means it ends. Dismissal without prejudice means you can try again).
I don't know if this signals anything or not, but the court noted that the case management conference scheduled for the day after this ruling was to still go on. Maybe that means that the court thinks the plaintiffs have a good chance of amending the complaint to avoid the statute of limitations issue, and so expects the case will continue?
I'd expect the next newsworthy event to be in late May if plaintiff cannot figure out a way to amend the complaint to avoid the statute of limitations issue. If plaintiff does amend the complaint successfully, that probably won't be newsworthy, and the case will continue. That continuation will still mostly just be motions by the parties maneuvering to try to get favorable evidence in, exclude unfavorable evidence, and get favorable interpretations of the law, and the judge's rulings on those motions. None of this stuff is interesting enough to most people, even most techies, to make the news.
