Why Tech Wages Stagnated

This was sent to me by my #2 son who is currently living in Moscow managing a grocery store. My family has been in the grocery business since the early 1900s. I worked in the family store growing up. Too funny. And he is a UChicago graduate (with honors) – jobs are hard to find. And the grocery store? An adjunct to the US Embassy.

Well anyway – the story he sent me is about a price fixing scheme between Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Lucasfilm, Pixar,Dell, IBM, eBay, Microsoft, Comcast, Clear Channel, Dreamworks, and many others. The total number of workers involved is on the order of a million.

Why did they do it?

This timeline is important to establish because it demonstrates precisely what makes this scheme illegal: secret cross-agreements between two or more parties to fix wages in the labor market, at a time when tech engineer wages were soaring, threatening profits.

The article deals in depth with a civil suit by the employees affected. If you want to join the class action you can do it at High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation Settlement Administration Website.

Me? I could never stand company politics, so for the vast majority of my career I was freelance with its ups and downs. I’m much poorer for it. But I’m happier. So I like to think, anyway.