Apple is suing multiple companies in the name of IP theft. Well I think these anti-poaching agreements are a form of theft. Employees did not receive fair market salaries.
It's not black and white, but you can't say Apple is 100% correct in going after IP theft and yet they are 100% innocent in pursuing these non-poaching agreements.
Consumer boycotts are rarely about price, if the price of a good is too high people simply don't buy it, which is a clear signal to the seller. A boycott is not denying anyone any right as there is no 'right' that people are compelled to buy the product you are offering.
Contrast this with what this case alleges, that Apple, Google, etc.. entered into an active agreement that not only would they not actively recruit (I am fine with that agreement) but more so they would not even hire if someone came to them completely 'out of the blue' but happened to work for one of these other companies currently. Further, they would actually alert the employer, likely so the employer could take some action against their property...I mean employee.
The stupidity of ideas like this is they are counterproductive. If your employees are 'shopping around' or seriously entertaining recruitment offers it likely means they are unhappy in your employ. In this case it is best for everyone for them to go elsewhere. You know how you retain good employees? By giving them challenging work, minimizing stupid bureaucratic taxes, avoiding silly office politics, paying them fairly and treating them with basic dignity and respect. What a concept.
The stupidity of ideas like this is they are counterproductive. If your employees are 'shopping around' or seriously entertaining recruitment offers it likely means they are unhappy in your employ. In this case it is best for everyone for them to go elsewhere. You know how you retain good employees? By giving them challenging work, minimizing stupid bureaucratic taxes, avoiding silly office politics, paying them fairly and treating them with basic dignity and respect. What a concept.
It's probably not insightful to frame this problem, as you seem to have done, in terms of the naive "markets are always best" argument, especially when that model seems to imply that employees should always be "shopping around," by definition. You say that "it is best for everyone for [dissatisfied employees] to go elsewhere." Where to begin? Specific persons in your employ aren't fungible. They've accumulated training and product knowledge that you might direly need in order to meet a deadline or bring a product to market before a competitor, to cite the most obvious objection. In other words, the cost/benefit ratio of retaining a given employee is dominated by factors external to the labor market.
I'd also be interested to hear, in detail, how your particular arrangement of challenging work, bureaucracy, office politics, fair pay, and dignity and respect programs both reaches a maximum of employee satisfaction and functions in even one competitive company. And then I'd like to hear how that generalizes, from first principles, to all technology companies everywhere. For example, how are you going to stop office politics from coming in to play during the distribution of challenging work, say in one of the "schlep" companies that pg wants to fund, all while minimizing "stupid bureaucratic taxes." And, which of bureaucracy or politics is going to be more generally erosive of "basic dignity and respect," if you have to choose between them?
I mean, it sounds nice, from an employee's or prospective employee's perspective, to just say, "Employers should just do only amazing things to me, or I'm within my rights to throw a fit and leave to go work for an obviously smarter employer," but that doesn't mean you've actually got a workable hypothesis.
>when that model seems to imply that employees should always be "shopping around," by definition.
I do not believe it implies that. It only implies that if you imagine the people can never be satisfied and should continuously seek higher pay/more power/etc... On the hedonic treadmill so to speak. I think people can be quite happy even if they aren't getting absolute top <insert motivating concept here>. For example, I am about 99% sure I could leave my present employer and find another job which would pay me more. Does that mean I should leave? It depends. Specifically on what I value. If my only concern (or topmost concern) is absolute top dollar then yes, I should leave. If my company wants to prevent that they can up my pay. If they know there is no way I can leave (i.e. they have agreed with the majority of large competitors to not hire me) then they have leverage that is simply unconscionable to me. Conversely if they do not believe I am worth my monetary demands then severing the relationship is the logical thing to do.
>Specific persons in your employ aren't fungible. They've accumulated training and product knowledge that you might direly need in order to meet a deadline or bring a product to market before a competitor, to cite the most obvious objection.
I never said they were fungible, I don't believe they are. This is part of employee power. If they were simply cogs in the machinery then employers would have all the power. Since they are not, employers must actually engage in a negotiation/agreement process with their employees and actually gasp try to ensure their continued happiness (note: this doesn't mean showering them with constant praise and telling them they are delicate little snowflakes and appeasing to their every demand no matter how ridiculous). They have to ensure that they are providing compelling value in a myriad of dimensions to retain said employees. They have to understand what motivates their employees on an individual level and strive to maximize the value they provide to said employee such that they exert a gravitational attraction making the employee not want to leave.
>In other words, the cost/benefit ratio of retaining a given employee is dominated by factors external to the labor market.
How so? This information the employee has only has value in as much as someone is willing to pay for it. If I have learned the esoterica of your operations and you decide that knowledge isn't worth whatever I am asking then that is a decision you freely made, you can't then cry that I am taking that knowledge elsewhere. If another employer decides that knowledge is worth what I ask then that is a decision that have made, both are made 'in the context of the labor market' and my value as an employee should be dictated by what said market will pay me vs. what I want, i.e. as a negotiation. If companies agree to simply not allow people to transfer there is no negotiation. Further the idea of stunting the intermingling of knowledge/ideas across company boundaries impedes the flow of knowledge/ideas and has an overall detrimental outcome for society as a whole. I am sure you have encountered people that have spent too long in a single place and are set in ways that make sense only in that one place. That is not healthy or good, we should not strive to institutionalize that.
>I'd also be interested to hear, in detail, how your particular arrangement of challenging work, bureaucracy, office politics, fair pay, and dignity and respect programs both reaches a maximum of employee satisfaction and functions in even one competitive company.
I think the idea that one can maximize along all these dimensions is a fallacy. If there was such a place that maximized all of this then everyone would want to work there and competitors would simply have to choose from the folks 'not good enough' to work at said fabled place. I don't believe human happiness is something that lends itself to some kind of Tayloristic maximization like the throughput of automated machinery. That said there are clearly places that are more desirable/better to work at than others, in any industry. The fact that I would rather work at say Google than Amazon says something about the environments and how well they have maximized what I view as important. The fact that someone else may, rationally, have the exact opposite view simply proves the startling fact that human beings are unique and can't be treated as a mass aggregate of indistinguishable things.
>And, which of bureaucracy or politics is going to be more generally erosive of "basic dignity and respect," if you have to choose between them?
This can't be stated, in general, which is the problem with your whole argument as I see it. You seem to be under the impression that there is a maximization function that applies to all people across all situations and industries. I don't believe that to be true. The balance between bureaucracy and politics and how to best achieve said balance to maximize happiness of your current employees and attract the kind of candidates you want is precisely what management/HR roles are about. There is no silver bullet here, if you are looking for one you will generally be disappointed.
>Employers should just do only amazing things to me, or I'm within my rights to throw a fit and leave to go work for an obviously smarter employer
That is clearly a strawman and doesn't really relate in any way to my argument that people should in fact have the right to shop their talents around if they so desire, and that market should not be unduly stifled by back-room agreements between employers to not hire 'certain types'. Imagine the outrage (rightly so) if the agreement was that they won't higher minorities? The hiring decisions should be made on the grounds of what is best for the company making the offer, and that should be based on the skill-sets they need, the benefits they have to offer and the talent they can attract. As a shareholder it worries me that companies are possibly passing up on good employees that would bring value simply because they had some agreement with a competitor to 'not hire their employees'. I really see little difference between this and price collusion, which I think is clearly detrimental to a well functioning economy.
>but that doesn't mean you've actually got a workable hypothesis.
A number of companies (Google, Facebook, etc..) actually bill themselves as empowering their employees, lessening bureaucracy and hassle, paying competitive wages, giving you the opportunity to work on challenging problems, etc.. So I think there are existence proofs that these things are generally desirable and the only argument is 'how does one balance all of these things', and as I said I don't think there is a mathematical formula for doing that, which is unfortunate but also exciting as it is the same as saying there is not exactly one optimal solution for most interesting problems. There are generally competing ways with different tradeoffs that one must understand when trying to choose the one that is best in their particular situation. I don't believe the solution to the problem is to simply try to make it go away by 'trapping' your employees by agreeing with competitors that they shouldn't hire your employees and you will do the same to them. Calling this a gentleman's agreement is laughable.
Where did I say you should 'compel' someone to hire you? All I said (or rather implied) is that if you go to a place advertising employment opportunities, you pass all of their tests/criteria for hire and then they don't hire you because you work for someone with whom they have made one of these secret agreements, that is a dysfunctional market. The fact these agreements were generally secret says a lot about the people making them and the fact that they knew full well it would be viewed very unfavorably by their employees. When you are instituting something you need to 'keep secret' from your employees maybe you should really think hard about the validity of what you are doing.
And, when you boycott a company, you don't buy a product even if it pass all your functional test/criteria for consuming. But you don't buy it because the product is made by some company you happens to agree within your group/community that you are not going to buy from the company.
The difference is that one of my functional test/criteria is precisely that I want to support the company making it, so it couldn't possibly pass such a test. I don't buy things that are made with slave labor or child labor, that doesn't mean I am 'unfairly' discriminating against people that use slave or child labor :)
I think if companies want to engage in this sort of behavior they should put in the job adverts "Googlers need not apply" or something to that end. At least be forthright with your plans to 'no hire' simply because they may be employed with one of these multitude of companies that you made some secret pact with.
Going beyond that and reporting back to their present employers that they may be looking around is somewhat reprehensible and a breach of confidence and etiquette. People may be 'looking around' for a multitude of reasons, eventually if they plan on leaving their current employ they will need to have that conversation with their employer, but to 'poison the well' by immediately calling their employer if their resume crosses your desk just lacks in common decency and indicates you work in an environment I would never want to be part of, so come to think of it maybe you have done us all a favor :)
>The fact these agreements were generally secret says a lot about the people making them and the fact that they knew full well it would be viewed very unfavorably by their employees. When you are instituting something you need to 'keep secret' from your employees maybe you should really think hard about the validity of what you are doing.
And what about employee who goes to a job interview in secret - does that reflect on validity of his actions ? Again, the double standards are really bugging me with these sort of things, it's OK if a consumer does something, if a union pushes on employers and legislators to protect labor and act monopolistic/like a cartel - but when it's the other way around then all the sudden the moral fabric of the society is falling apart. It's likely that competing corporations are doing this because they are loosing more than they are gaining by stealing employees from each other. As long as they can't influence the legislators people will break the pact when it suits them, cartels have a very hard time enforcing their agreements and break up because of incentives for any individual entity to cheat. For the record I'm not an employer, I just hate double standards.
It depends I suppose. If your employer has absolutely no idea that you aren't happy, then I would say there is a communication breakdown going on. If your employees are 'testing the water' so to speak, and you are treating them fairly and paying them fairly then they will discover that in looking at other options, no harm, no foul. If you are treating them poorly, paying them poorly, etc.. they will also discover that, but then again they should discover that.
I think this situation of employees looking around could really only upset people who desire the kind of blind company loyalty that simply doesn't exist anymore, for multiple reasons including a lack of loyalty/dedication from the employer.
Double standards implies treating two people in identical situations differently. This is not the case here as employees and employers aren't in identical situations, there is a definite information/power asymmetry in play.
Also, on one hand, there is a collusion between two parties. For an employee 'looking around' there is no collusion. Now if that same employee secretly tried to get his co-workers to quit and leave the employer high and dry at some vital point (or really any point), then they would be acting like just as big of douchebags as the kind of people that make these sort of agreements. But I haven't heard that is happening. I have basically heard companies say 'ohhh it is hard to retain super talented people because others are always trying to lure them away', yep, that sounds accurate. The solution isn't 'I know, let's all agree to NOT take each others good employees' but rather 'how can we stem attrition by understanding why these talented people are leaving and taking steps to fix the problem?' Then again I suppose making shady agreements over the phone is a lot simpler.
Also, talking to myself now, upon further thought I think the proper parallel here is between employees looking for another job and employers planning on firing/laying off employees. The latter is generally not done in the open, or with any sort of advance notice, thus it isn't clear the former should be either.
Because they are market actors at one end of transaction. This is not about "rights" other than property rights - nobody is being forced in to anything here - you don't have a right to work for someone, they have a right to refuse your service for whatever reason - plain and simple. Unfortunately there are laws that restrict this freedoms because most voters are workers and not employers.
You keep talking about "employers", but that isn't what you mean, and it's dishonest. The generic "employer" has few restrictions at all. In most jurisdictions, I am quite free, as an individual acting in my personal capacity, to hire and fire, for example, a maid, with very few restrictions at all.
What you are talking about are corporations. Corporations are artificial constructs that exist at the whim of society. They have no inherent rights, property or otherwise. They have those privileges which we choose to explicitly bestow upon them.
Your next point will be that corporations are made up of people and invested in by people. This is true, but irrelevant. The corporation is a distinct entity, and the epic disaster that is limited liability ensures that its effect on the market is skewed from that of a human being.
Corporations are not people, and should not be treated as such.
>The generic "employer" has few restrictions at all. In most jurisdictions, I am quite free, as an individual acting in my personal capacity, to hire and fire, for example, a maid, with very few restrictions at all.
That may be true in the US to some extent, but it's nowhere near true in Europe (where I'm from). Labor laws apply to everyone and protect labor in various way from competition.
You keep talking about "rights" - where am I claiming any rights for "corporations" ? Corporations are simply property in this case, preventing corporations from making these agreements is violating the rights of owners to manage their property.
Considering these are US companies making an agreement about US employees, where else is relevant?
> Corporations are simply property in this case, preventing corporations from making these agreements is violating the rights of owners to manage their property.
By taking advantage of the corporate structure society has over-generously granted them, the investors have agreed to surrender their rights.
They can get most of them back by dispensing with the corporate structure and acting in their own personal capacities, without the market-distorting characteristics granted to corporations.
Do you really not see the difference between "companies not being allowed to conspire to not hire certain people" and "compelling a company to hire you"?
Read it in context. People are allowed to conspire to avoid buying some product, for whatever reason they choose. He said that's different because you don't have a right to compel anyone to buy your product - implying that you have a right to compel someone to buy your labor.
Those are not at all similar except that they both involve multiple entities doing something. All the rest of the details are different. I think you have abstracted the situation too much in your attempt to make it amenable to logical analysis. You're ignoring too much relevant information.
You make the assumption that corporations and people are on equal footing, so that your comparison is valid in the first place. Consumers do not form cartels.
Its disgusting to see that in this day and age that large companies can be actively engaged in such collusive anti-competitive practices. I dont care who they are or whether or not they knew that what they were doing was illegal - the architects of this 'gentlemans agreement' should have time in jail for this.
Jail time for agreeing not to cold-call employees of another company? ~~There is no evidence for anything more, and I don't know if there is any evidence that they actually followed through~~ (the history of cartels show that those agreements were rarely adhered to strictly, it seems even more unlikely considering how those companies are hurting for talent).
> Jail time for agreeing not to cold-call employees of another company?
There are evidence of worse than that:
"The evidence states that the defendants agreed not to poach employees from each other or give them offers if they voluntarily applied, and to notify the current employers of any employees trying to switch been. They also agreed not to enter into bidding wars and to limit the potential for employees to negotiate for higher salaries."
This headline is a good example of the problem with the passive voice. My first assumption when reading the headline was that an Apple lawyer told him that. A better headline would be something like:
"Palm CEO Told Jobs Anti-Poaching Pact 'Likely Illegal'"
In general, using the passive voice in a news context anonymizes the subjects of a particular story. In this case, the headline writer probably did so in order to make Jobs the only subject of the headline, but it hides very important information about the story.
You're probably thinking that the first sentence provides the information, but studies show that a large percentage of news readers read only the headline (I suspect that is especially true about news aggregators), and that there is a precipitous decline in readership in every sentence thereafter.
As a result, newswriters usually pay a lot of attention to making sure that headlines and article ledes have as much pertinent information as possible. As it should be.
This completely fits with what we know about Jobs, he felt laws didn't apply to him. I hesitate to say this is an "Apple" policy when it was Jobs calling another CEO and proposing a gentleman's agreement.
Why do you hesitate to say it was an Apple policy? The whole HR staff at both companies were involved. The fact that it was personally negotiated by two people at the top has no bearing on the fact that the companies were abiding by it.
These types of whole-company-on-board policies change departments permanently as well. If HR were willing to poach they would have ended up with "specialists" whose entire jobs were to basically "infiltrate" (either literally or externally at social functions) other companies, figure out who to poach and get them. None of those exist at those companies because of this policy.
I think that qualifies as industrial espionage. There are laws that forbid that behavior. And it is punishable with jail time. I don't know how many CEO's are willing to bet their necks doing that.
I hesitate because there is a difference in my mind between a stated policy and something that is discouraged from the top due to a phone conversation or one time email.
"They also agreed not to enter into bidding wars and to limit the potential for employees to negotiate for higher salaries."
But... but... but...
If companies can't be allowed to limit salary negotiations, how else can they claim there's a shortage of skilled talent in the US, necessitating importing cheaper labor?
I'd be interested to know what "anti-poaching" actually means. It could mean several things, which I'm listing from most reasonable to least reasonable:
* Don't try to sabotage the other company's projects by explicitly recruiting key people at crucial times for the project; but it's fine to hire for your own company's productivity.
* Don't use the competing company as just a pool of candidates (e.g. stand outside their door asking people to apply to your company); but if you happen to find them through other means (e.g. they come to you, you find them at a conference, etc.), then hire them.
* Don't ever hire directly from the other company.
* Don't hire someone from a competitor even if they already left.
* Don't hire someone that ever worked for a competitor.
So, how far do the actual agreements go? Did I miss a potential level of "anti-poaching"?
Apple creates such innovative products yet seems to subscribe to such regressive social policies. I have trouble gauging whether their products should be considered progress when things like this anti-poaching policy come to light.
They're a large corporation with shareholders to satisfy. With so much economic incentive to cheat it's not very surprising that they do. Disappointing, but not surprising.
I wonder how the Google fanboys will reconcile this with "Don't Be Evil". Colluding to keep salaries low and to prevent career mobility for your employees is pretty fucking evil in my book.
I'm not sure I understand why these anti-poaching agreements are or should be illegal. I understand the argument to be that, with no where else to go, they can lower the salaries of highly-skilled employees. But isn't there always somewhere else to go? If Apple employees can't go to Adobe, there's always Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Amazon, and a sea of startups.
Apologies for my ignorance on the matter, but I'm just not seeing what the big deal is.
Collusion is bad even for free markets (let alone other economic models), but rather than enter that lengthy argument, I'll point out one thing: they did this in secret.
I'd be somewhat more understanding of your argument, if the companies had publicly declared they were colluding to keep wages down and prevent employee mobility amongst themselves.
How do you figure prospective employees would have reacted to that?
Well were do you draw the line? Do 100% of open jobs have to be affected, 90%, 80%?
Pragmatically, I think Apple and Google are both big enough that collusion between them is going to have an effect on the market, even if no one else is "in on it". Idealistically, I don't like a companies of any size colluding. It seems to undermine principals of the open market.
It seems to me that the issue with this is the potential deception. If you know that two companies have this agreement, and you work for one of them, you will know that trying to switch between them won't get you anything good, so you'll look elsewhere instead. What if these agreements were allowed, but had to be shared with employees? Would such a requirement be legitimate and sufficient?
Unless you can't get a job at those companies, or don't want to work at them, or they also get involved in the collusion. Then you're actively being hurt.
> I understand the argument to be that, with no where else to go, they can lower the salaries of highly-skilled employees. But isn't there always somewhere else to go?
Sure, but let's change the context of the list and see if it makes a difference. Consider the following:
"If {some-company} employees can't go to {another-company}, there's always fast food, gas stations, grocery stores, logging and a sea of startups."
As absurd and bizarrely absolute as this sounds, the notion is the same: there's a list of alternatives that is deemed acceptable by parties other than you, the employed.
Still interested in letting others determine the available sources of your livelihood?
I agree. If natural persons can form collectives, guilds, and unions why can't corporate persons do the same? This is, of course, assuming that there is no special grant or license issued by the government to engage in that form of work.
1. This has nothing to do with the decision in Citizens United. This is about anti-trust regulation, which regulates collusive behavior, not speech. Any speech incidental to such a conspiracy (whether to rob a bank or fix wages in a labor market) is not protected anyway, whether it's an individual or a corporation speaking.
2. Please don't misrepresent the decision in Citizens United to make it stand for something which it does not. The holding in Citizens United was not that corporations == natural persons or that corporations have the same rights as natural persons. The holding was that that natural persons don't lose their rights to free speech (paid for with their own funds) because they join together into legal associations. Similar to how natural persons don't lose their 4th amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure or their 5th amendment protections against the government seizing their property when they form such associations.
Basically, they can't do that because it would undermine the market. The entire point of the market is to allocate resources effectively; if its rules allow multiple players to collude in an effort to change the results, it stops being effective.
So if a price of something is higher than what you want, you have to just live with it and can't form group with your friend to only buy from places that sell product at cheaper price?
Huh? I think you have things misunderstood. These executives are intentionally driving down the value of their employees and restricting their opportunities in what should be a free market. These are not products we're talking about, they're people..
Apple is suing multiple companies in the name of IP theft. Well I think these anti-poaching agreements are a form of theft. Employees did not receive fair market salaries.
It's not black and white, but you can't say Apple is 100% correct in going after IP theft and yet they are 100% innocent in pursuing these non-poaching agreements.