Silicon Valley companies colluded to keep salaries of tech talent artificially low:
In early 2005, as demand for Silicon Valley engineers began booming, Apple’s Steve Jobs sealed a secret and illegal pact with Google’s Eric Schmidt to artificially push their workers wages lower by agreeing not to recruit each other’s employees, sharing wage scale information, and punishing violators. On February 27, 2005, Bill Campbell, a member of Apple’s board of directors and senior advisor to Google, emailed Jobs to confirm that Eric Schmidt “got directly involved and firmly stopped all efforts to recruit anyone from Apple.”
And so forth:
In the geopolitics of Silicon Valley tech power, Adobe was no match for a corporate superpower like Apple. Inequality of the sort we’re experiencing today affects everyone in ways we haven’t even thought of — whether it’s Jobs bullying slightly lesser executives into joining an illegal wage-theft pact, or the tens of thousands of workers whose wages were artificially lowered, transferred into higher corporate earnings, and higher compensations for those already richest and most powerful to begin with.
Over the next two years, as the tech industry entered another frothing bubble, the secret wage-theft pact which began with Apple, Google and Pixar expanded to include Intuit and Intel. The secret agreements were based on relationships, and those relationships were forged in Silicon Valley’s incestuous boards of directors, which in the past has been recognized mostly as a problem for shareholders and corporate governance advocates, rather than for the tens of thousands of employees whose wages and lives are viscerally affected by their clubby backroom deals.
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