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In "Becoming Steve Jobs", Tim Cook says the following in regards to Apple's collusion scandal: "I know where Steve's head was. He wasn't doing anything to hold

In "Becoming Steve Jobs", Tim Cook says the following in regards to Apple's collusion scandal: "I know where Steve's head was. He wasn't doing anything to hold down salaries; it never came up. He had a simple objective: if we were working together on something, like with Intel, where we threw everything in the middle of the table and said, 'let's convert the Mac to the Intel processor', well, when we did that, we didn't want them poaching our employees that they were meeting, and they didn't want us poaching theirs. Doesn't it make sense that you wouldn't, that it's an OK thing? I don't think for a minute he thought he was doing anything bad. And I don't think he was thinking about saving any money. He was just very protective of his employees." Ed Catmull of Pixar, a seemingly gentle person, is similarly unapologetic about the issue. Why is it that, at a certain level, intelligent company leaders seem to stop thinking of their employees as individuals and instead start thinking of them as company assets? (I don't mean this as an anti-Apple comment. In fact, I want to give Jobs, Cook, and Catmull the benefit of the doubt, in the sense that they probably did approach the issue from the perspective of doing what's best for their companies, not as a quick way to save some paltry money. But that's kind of the underlying problem, isn't it? Once you've internalized the idea that your employees are company assets — that they aren't hard workers who make the company tick, but that they literally are the company — it's easy to slide down the slippery slope towards incredibly unethical and shady dealings like collusion. I wonder how this can be avoided.)

Zelphyr 12y ago
Maybe its Dunbar's number. These executives know and interact with so many people that perhaps its quite difficult for their minds to see their employees as people. But then, I've seen that attitude in startups. The passion for the company as a whole trumps everything so the people are easily disposable to them. Which, as in so many other areas of life, is completely backwards from what they perceive as logical.
cookiecaper 12y ago
You have to see both sides here. Employees are too quick to see this as being robbed of the opportunity to be the subject of a bidding war. Companies try not to start or escalate poaching wars because it's massively disruptive to everyone's projects. It takes a long time to replace someone and a long time to onboard someone. While it may be economically feasible to poach an employee, it's almost definitely detrimental to the entire industry's profitability to create a recruitment culture based on poaching. Since there's a strong tit-for-tat instinct when company B takes a high-value employee from company A, the companies just agree to avoid these tensions altogether. That's the big picture version that Catmull, Jobs, et al, are seeing. They're honestly not trying to keep your salary depressed this way, but they're an easy target for Justice Department lawyers that're trying to earn some street cred and "trade outlets" that are trying to earn lots of pageviews from artificially outraged workers. People believe they've been deprived of money and attention by default, so they'll eat up anything that appears superficially credible and gives them occasion to lay blame for that deprivation.
- archagon 12y ago
  Putting aside for the moment the illegality of collusion, I appreciate your take, and I think it's important to always try to see things from the other side, even if it stands against everything you believe in. With that said, isn't the obvious solution to just raise everyone's salaries? Also, the explanation only reinforces the idea that these executives view their employees as chips to be bartered, not free agents.
  - underbluewaters 12y ago
    How does raising salaries change the situation? All the other party has to do is raise the offer another 10k. There are enormous costs associated with loosing a valued employee, but naturally very little cost for the employee to move.
    - archagon 12y ago
      dragonwriter above offers a more informed solution: "But if a company wants to restrict 'poaching' of its employees unilaterally, it can just offer them defined-term personal services contracts with suitable compensation."
      - cookiecaper 12y ago
        Employees don't want that. The terms of the current relationship are centered around the employee's desire for continuity and stability. Most employees do not want to be tied down to the company in a binding fixed-term commitment; how much worse would things be if people weren't free to pursue other employment whenever they wanted? How much more abuse would employees suffer if they didn't have the option of walking out and finding comparable employment at any time? Most employees want benefits and perks that would be very difficult to provide in the context of independent agency, like medical insurance. In professional circumstances that are based on procuring such agents, there's usually a union, co-op, axis, or league that furnishes the benefits the worker desires. Read this page [1] about the stability NBA players lacked prior to unionization. The grass is always greener. Perhaps an employee's raw salary would be higher if a free agency model was used, though I personally doubt it would be, but most of the terms of this game are defined by the employee, not the employer. A world where every employee is an independent agent with his/her own contract is a much, much different world than we have now and would take a long time to analyze with any depth or completion. It's not that there aren't ways to make it work, but the standard employment relationship exists because it's the employment arrangement most conducive to the type of lifestyle the average person wants to have. [1] http://nbpa.com/about-nbpa/ http://nbpa.com/about-nbpa/
lewisl9029 12y ago
"He was just very protective of his employees." The word "protective" doesn't seem apt here, as that would imply he had his employees' best interests at heart, when clearly he only had the company's best interests in mind (which is fair, given that's the job of the CEO). Try "possessive".
- r00fus 12y ago
  Using HR lingo, try "s/employees/resources/". Now it parses, neh? I've read that book (audio) - that was one of the more cringeworthy passages of the book. What I gathered was that Tim probably felt like "hey I wouldn't do this, but it's Steve and he's my boss so I have to put a marginal defense out there".
serve_yay 12y ago
That quote is so nuts! He didn't think for a minute he was doing anything wrong. That's supposed to make me feel better? I agree with you, the way these rich people look at employees as chess pieces rather than humans is awful. If you're so afraid of someone quitting, then address that by making it worth their while not to quit! Not with collusion for god's sake. The fact that they call someone getting a better job "being poached" just says it all really. (If you use this phrase, take a moment to really think about what you are saying.)
- astrodust 12y ago
  The optimal arrangement for both companies is no poaching. As soon as someone pulls the trigger and starts poaching it gets exponentially more expensive for these companies to operate. This is the Prisoner's Dilemma, plain and simple.
  - serve_yay 12y ago
    To even use the phrase "poaching" is to give too much to the devil. It implies that a person "belongs" at a certain organization, as opposed to being a self-interested economic actor, and that there is something incorrect or dirty or unethical or wrong about leaving where they work to work somewhere else.
    - Spooky23 12y ago
      The free market is only for the billionaires. You are just some resource to be exploited and expended.
      - serve_yay 12y ago
        Sadly true. But what's worse is, look at who I'm replying to - not a group of CEOs or other billionaires, I reckon. Even the people who get screwed by this kind of shit agree with the reasoning behind it, for some reason.
  - kefka 12y ago
jboy55 12y ago
If you are partnering with a company, you typically can break the partnership by poaching employees. I think the biggest problem is this anti-bidding strategy extended to companys that weren't partners.
wwweston 12y ago
> "He wasn't doing anything to hold down salaries" Wow. That's... ballsy. Sure, holding down salaries might not have been the primary motivation. Doesn't change the fact that collusive no-hire agreements hold down salaries, and Cook and Jobs are smart enough to know this.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
kelukelugames 12y ago
I read Isaacson's biography. Steve Jobs is convinced he never did anything bad in his entire life. Except for denying paternity, but that still took a few decades.
- jingo 12y ago
  Perhaps the reason Jobs has been convincing to so many followers is because of the power of his own self-delusion. It is possible he was very good at deluding himself. Perhaps that self-delusion is contagious. If one wants to believe something strongly enough, then maybe one can believe it. If people want to believe that the only way to produce great form factor and ease of use in a computer is to be Jobs-like and conduct "business" like Apple, then they might believe that, even if there is a good chance or evidence this behaviour is not necessary. It seems people have a difficult time separating the Apple products from the organization that sells them. One may be worthy of adoration, the other may not.
LordKano 12y ago
Several years ago, I was contacting by a recruiting firm about a job opening. I was interested, I fit the description of the person for whom they were looking and I wanted to proceed. The recruiter was going off an old copy of my resume that they found online and was unaware that I had a different employer. When I disclosed this, they immediately refused to go any further in the process because they were worried that if they helped me to leave then my employer wouldn't use them to fill future openings. I told them to lose my number. Since that time, when one of my friends is looking for work in tech, I steer them away from this particular recruiting firm (I have no desire to blast them here) because of my experience with them. This happened in the Pittsburgh area, I can only imagine what it was like out there on the left coast. Employees do not belong to their employers, I don't know why this is such a difficult concept for some people to grasp.
- greenyoda 12y ago
  I agree that this sucks, but you need to keep in mind that the recruiter works for his corporate clients, not for you. If helping you would cause him to lose his contract with his biggest customer, he'll make the obvious choice.
  - LordKano 12y ago
    It was not a big company. I was working for a small-ish family owned business. They had, maybe 20-30 employees. This was the end of the final email exchange between myself and this recruiting company. Clearly, the bottom line is that clients pay XXXXXX and talent does not. It belittles us both to pretend that it's really about ethics or loyalty. I don't maintain business relationships in which my interests come last and I don't do business with the dishonest. Again, please, lose my number.
_cudgel 12y ago
Why is it that, at a certain level, intelligent company leaders seem to stop thinking of their employees as individuals and instead start thinking of them as company assets? I think this is directly related to the language used within most companies -- at least all those I've worked at -- to describe their employees: human resources. I think this is because people too easily conflate human resources with natural resources, which are consumed by some manufacturing process. Once upon a time, I worked at a company whose internal management guidelines stressed loading new hires with as much work as they could bear to determine their breaking points. Work load was then scaled back to some sustainable-ish percentage of that maximum, and the employees were worked until burnout. The expectation was they would then leave the company. Obviously they had an absolutely absurd amount of turnover. Upper management saw nothing wrong with utilizing their resources in this manner. This experience obviously colors my view of things. In my opinion, the phrase human resource is simply dehumanizing. But, I also think it might be a necessary psychological barrier that is required by massive companies. If the upper management actually conceive of their organization as made up of employees, not human resources, they may act or react more slowly, become less risk averse, etc. That is bad for business! Likewise, I think there's a similar statement to be made about citizens vs. consumers when speaking about another type of large organization: governments. Language and the words we choose matter. They shape our thoughts, and define what is possible. We ought to choose better words.
- abc_lisper 12y ago
  While I don't agree with many of the comments here, I agree with yours specifically. I really hate the phrase human resource, like it is something that is ready for exploitation. One of the many reasons I never worked for big consulting companies is that, they look at things as problems vs resources. If the problems cannot be solved by X resources, try X+1. There they are called resources, not even human resources.
  - cgio 12y ago
    In consulting, your only resources are human.
nathanvanfleet 12y ago
But even the Tim Cook statement is the exact same tone as Ed Catmull. At first "protect his employees" sounds like it's as if he's protecting chess pieces from being killed in battle. But really what it boils down to is him protecting his employees from becoming employees at another company, from getting opportunities outside of Apple. Which is essentially him keeping assets to himself.
yuhong 12y ago
I really wish they could actually admit wrongdoing in the lawsuits, I suggest with an apology letter.
- LoSboccacc 12y ago
  they are still in the point they want to marginalize damage done, as amount of compensation is till being discussed.
outside1234 12y ago
Steve Jobs had a simple agenda: do what was good for Apple and Steve Jobs. Everything else was collateral damage if it didn't fit in with that goal (mistreated kids, wives, employees, ...).
sytelus 12y ago
Remember in this case we have two companies which decided to work together on a project and established no-poaching agreement. If you ask your friend to go out with you on a trip along with your girlfriend, would it be ok if your friend builds relationship with her during the trip and she breaks up with you? You can argue that may be your girlfriend found a better fit and you should be ok with that. OR you can argue that you and your girlfriend were doing just fine but your friend violated your trust and lured her away destroying your precious relationship. I bet you can find people arguing both cases as "obviously" right outcome. PS: I'm not arguing any of the sides but I'm intrigued by this morality problem.
- rojoca 12y ago
  If you sign an agreement with your friend behind your girlfriend's back you're looking out for your own interests. You're in effect controlling or limiting her choice without her knowledge.
- ecdavis 12y ago
  Oh please, your analogy doesn't fit at all. Apple and Intel aren't friends, they're competitors in the labour market, both hoping to attract the top talent. If they had legitimate concerns about their employees leaving then they should've focused on convincing their employees to stay by increasing their compensation and improving their work environment. Perhaps "corporations are people, my friend" but they're not buddies out on a camping trip with a girl. There's no Corporation-A-broke-their-word-to-Corporation-B - there's business and competition is a huge part of that.
- mikeash 12y ago
  I don't think that analogy works. The boyfriend/girlfriend relationship is completely different from the employer/employee relationship, and the whole point of this controversy is that companies aren't supposed to be friends. Here's what I think would be a better analogy: let's say you run a restaurant in a small town. The restaurant business is booming, and you and your competitors are all expanding, to the point where it's getting hard to find qualified cooks and servers. The cooks and servers start working to get a piece of the pie. They move between restaurants as higher pay is offered. You desperately need more staff and since you can't find new people, you resort to soliciting the staff at competing restaurants and offering them more money. They do the same to your employees. Average pay rises. You and the other owners don't like this at all. Cooking and serving was a minimum-wage job not too long ago! This steadily increasing pay is eating into your profits. So you all get together and agree to put a stop to it: you won't try to hire away their staff, and they won't try to hire away yours. Pay stagnates, and you and the other owners get to keep more of your profits. This is what happened with Apple and these other companies over time, only with computer people instead of cooks and servers. Is it immoral for businesses to collude to artificially hold down wages? I think most people would say yes. Probably more importantly, it's illegal.

Zelphyr 12y ago

Maybe its Dunbar's number. These executives know and interact with so many people that perhaps its quite difficult for their minds to see their employees as people. But then, I've seen that attitude in startups. The passion for the company as a whole trumps everything so the people are easily disposable to them. Which, as in so many other areas of life, is completely backwards from what they perceive as logical.

cookiecaper 12y ago

You have to see both sides here. Employees are too quick to see this as being robbed of the opportunity to be the subject of a bidding war. Companies try not to start or escalate poaching wars because it's massively disruptive to everyone's projects. It takes a long time to replace someone and a long time to onboard someone. While it may be economically feasible to poach an employee, it's almost definitely detrimental to the entire industry's profitability to create a recruitment culture based on poaching. Since there's a strong tit-for-tat instinct when company B takes a high-value employee from company A, the companies just agree to avoid these tensions altogether. That's the big picture version that Catmull, Jobs, et al, are seeing. They're honestly not trying to keep your salary depressed this way, but they're an easy target for Justice Department lawyers that're trying to earn some street cred and "trade outlets" that are trying to earn lots of pageviews from artificially outraged workers. People believe they've been deprived of money and attention by default, so they'll eat up anything that appears superficially credible and gives them occasion to lay blame for that deprivation.

archagon 12y ago
Putting aside for the moment the illegality of collusion, I appreciate your take, and I think it's important to always try to see things from the other side, even if it stands against everything you believe in. With that said, isn't the obvious solution to just raise everyone's salaries? Also, the explanation only reinforces the idea that these executives view their employees as chips to be bartered, not free agents.
- underbluewaters 12y ago
  How does raising salaries change the situation? All the other party has to do is raise the offer another 10k. There are enormous costs associated with loosing a valued employee, but naturally very little cost for the employee to move.
  - archagon 12y ago
    dragonwriter above offers a more informed solution: "But if a company wants to restrict 'poaching' of its employees unilaterally, it can just offer them defined-term personal services contracts with suitable compensation."
    - cookiecaper 12y ago
      Employees don't want that. The terms of the current relationship are centered around the employee's desire for continuity and stability. Most employees do not want to be tied down to the company in a binding fixed-term commitment; how much worse would things be if people weren't free to pursue other employment whenever they wanted? How much more abuse would employees suffer if they didn't have the option of walking out and finding comparable employment at any time? Most employees want benefits and perks that would be very difficult to provide in the context of independent agency, like medical insurance. In professional circumstances that are based on procuring such agents, there's usually a union, co-op, axis, or league that furnishes the benefits the worker desires. Read this page [1] about the stability NBA players lacked prior to unionization. The grass is always greener. Perhaps an employee's raw salary would be higher if a free agency model was used, though I personally doubt it would be, but most of the terms of this game are defined by the employee, not the employer. A world where every employee is an independent agent with his/her own contract is a much, much different world than we have now and would take a long time to analyze with any depth or completion. It's not that there aren't ways to make it work, but the standard employment relationship exists because it's the employment arrangement most conducive to the type of lifestyle the average person wants to have. [1] http://nbpa.com/about-nbpa/ http://nbpa.com/about-nbpa/

lewisl9029 12y ago

"He was just very protective of his employees." The word "protective" doesn't seem apt here, as that would imply he had his employees' best interests at heart, when clearly he only had the company's best interests in mind (which is fair, given that's the job of the CEO). Try "possessive".

r00fus 12y ago
Using HR lingo, try "s/employees/resources/". Now it parses, neh? I've read that book (audio) - that was one of the more cringeworthy passages of the book. What I gathered was that Tim probably felt like "hey I wouldn't do this, but it's Steve and he's my boss so I have to put a marginal defense out there".

serve_yay 12y ago

That quote is so nuts! He didn't think for a minute he was doing anything wrong. That's supposed to make me feel better? I agree with you, the way these rich people look at employees as chess pieces rather than humans is awful. If you're so afraid of someone quitting, then address that by making it worth their while not to quit! Not with collusion for god's sake. The fact that they call someone getting a better job "being poached" just says it all really. (If you use this phrase, take a moment to really think about what you are saying.)

astrodust 12y ago
The optimal arrangement for both companies is no poaching. As soon as someone pulls the trigger and starts poaching it gets exponentially more expensive for these companies to operate. This is the Prisoner's Dilemma, plain and simple.
- serve_yay 12y ago
  To even use the phrase "poaching" is to give too much to the devil. It implies that a person "belongs" at a certain organization, as opposed to being a self-interested economic actor, and that there is something incorrect or dirty or unethical or wrong about leaving where they work to work somewhere else.
  - Spooky23 12y ago
    The free market is only for the billionaires. You are just some resource to be exploited and expended.
    - serve_yay 12y ago
      Sadly true. But what's worse is, look at who I'm replying to - not a group of CEOs or other billionaires, I reckon. Even the people who get screwed by this kind of shit agree with the reasoning behind it, for some reason.
- kefka 12y ago

jboy55 12y ago

If you are partnering with a company, you typically can break the partnership by poaching employees. I think the biggest problem is this anti-bidding strategy extended to companys that weren't partners.

wwweston 12y ago

> "He wasn't doing anything to hold down salaries" Wow. That's... ballsy. Sure, holding down salaries might not have been the primary motivation. Doesn't change the fact that collusive no-hire agreements hold down salaries, and Cook and Jobs are smart enough to know this.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

kelukelugames 12y ago

I read Isaacson's biography. Steve Jobs is convinced he never did anything bad in his entire life. Except for denying paternity, but that still took a few decades.

jingo 12y ago
Perhaps the reason Jobs has been convincing to so many followers is because of the power of his own self-delusion. It is possible he was very good at deluding himself. Perhaps that self-delusion is contagious. If one wants to believe something strongly enough, then maybe one can believe it. If people want to believe that the only way to produce great form factor and ease of use in a computer is to be Jobs-like and conduct "business" like Apple, then they might believe that, even if there is a good chance or evidence this behaviour is not necessary. It seems people have a difficult time separating the Apple products from the organization that sells them. One may be worthy of adoration, the other may not.

LordKano 12y ago

Several years ago, I was contacting by a recruiting firm about a job opening. I was interested, I fit the description of the person for whom they were looking and I wanted to proceed. The recruiter was going off an old copy of my resume that they found online and was unaware that I had a different employer. When I disclosed this, they immediately refused to go any further in the process because they were worried that if they helped me to leave then my employer wouldn't use them to fill future openings. I told them to lose my number. Since that time, when one of my friends is looking for work in tech, I steer them away from this particular recruiting firm (I have no desire to blast them here) because of my experience with them. This happened in the Pittsburgh area, I can only imagine what it was like out there on the left coast. Employees do not belong to their employers, I don't know why this is such a difficult concept for some people to grasp.

greenyoda 12y ago
I agree that this sucks, but you need to keep in mind that the recruiter works for his corporate clients, not for you. If helping you would cause him to lose his contract with his biggest customer, he'll make the obvious choice.
- LordKano 12y ago
  It was not a big company. I was working for a small-ish family owned business. They had, maybe 20-30 employees. This was the end of the final email exchange between myself and this recruiting company. Clearly, the bottom line is that clients pay XXXXXX and talent does not. It belittles us both to pretend that it's really about ethics or loyalty. I don't maintain business relationships in which my interests come last and I don't do business with the dishonest. Again, please, lose my number.

_cudgel 12y ago

Why is it that, at a certain level, intelligent company leaders seem to stop thinking of their employees as individuals and instead start thinking of them as company assets? I think this is directly related to the language used within most companies -- at least all those I've worked at -- to describe their employees: human resources. I think this is because people too easily conflate human resources with natural resources, which are consumed by some manufacturing process. Once upon a time, I worked at a company whose internal management guidelines stressed loading new hires with as much work as they could bear to determine their breaking points. Work load was then scaled back to some sustainable-ish percentage of that maximum, and the employees were worked until burnout. The expectation was they would then leave the company. Obviously they had an absolutely absurd amount of turnover. Upper management saw nothing wrong with utilizing their resources in this manner. This experience obviously colors my view of things. In my opinion, the phrase human resource is simply dehumanizing. But, I also think it might be a necessary psychological barrier that is required by massive companies. If the upper management actually conceive of their organization as made up of employees, not human resources, they may act or react more slowly, become less risk averse, etc. That is bad for business! Likewise, I think there's a similar statement to be made about citizens vs. consumers when speaking about another type of large organization: governments. Language and the words we choose matter. They shape our thoughts, and define what is possible. We ought to choose better words.

abc_lisper 12y ago
While I don't agree with many of the comments here, I agree with yours specifically. I really hate the phrase human resource, like it is something that is ready for exploitation. One of the many reasons I never worked for big consulting companies is that, they look at things as problems vs resources. If the problems cannot be solved by X resources, try X+1. There they are called resources, not even human resources.
- cgio 12y ago
  In consulting, your only resources are human.

nathanvanfleet 12y ago

But even the Tim Cook statement is the exact same tone as Ed Catmull. At first "protect his employees" sounds like it's as if he's protecting chess pieces from being killed in battle. But really what it boils down to is him protecting his employees from becoming employees at another company, from getting opportunities outside of Apple. Which is essentially him keeping assets to himself.

yuhong 12y ago

I really wish they could actually admit wrongdoing in the lawsuits, I suggest with an apology letter.

LoSboccacc 12y ago
they are still in the point they want to marginalize damage done, as amount of compensation is till being discussed.

outside1234 12y ago

Steve Jobs had a simple agenda: do what was good for Apple and Steve Jobs. Everything else was collateral damage if it didn't fit in with that goal (mistreated kids, wives, employees, ...).

sytelus 12y ago

Remember in this case we have two companies which decided to work together on a project and established no-poaching agreement. If you ask your friend to go out with you on a trip along with your girlfriend, would it be ok if your friend builds relationship with her during the trip and she breaks up with you? You can argue that may be your girlfriend found a better fit and you should be ok with that. OR you can argue that you and your girlfriend were doing just fine but your friend violated your trust and lured her away destroying your precious relationship. I bet you can find people arguing both cases as "obviously" right outcome. PS: I'm not arguing any of the sides but I'm intrigued by this morality problem.

rojoca 12y ago
If you sign an agreement with your friend behind your girlfriend's back you're looking out for your own interests. You're in effect controlling or limiting her choice without her knowledge.
ecdavis 12y ago
Oh please, your analogy doesn't fit at all. Apple and Intel aren't friends, they're competitors in the labour market, both hoping to attract the top talent. If they had legitimate concerns about their employees leaving then they should've focused on convincing their employees to stay by increasing their compensation and improving their work environment. Perhaps "corporations are people, my friend" but they're not buddies out on a camping trip with a girl. There's no Corporation-A-broke-their-word-to-Corporation-B - there's business and competition is a huge part of that.
mikeash 12y ago
I don't think that analogy works. The boyfriend/girlfriend relationship is completely different from the employer/employee relationship, and the whole point of this controversy is that companies aren't supposed to be friends. Here's what I think would be a better analogy: let's say you run a restaurant in a small town. The restaurant business is booming, and you and your competitors are all expanding, to the point where it's getting hard to find qualified cooks and servers. The cooks and servers start working to get a piece of the pie. They move between restaurants as higher pay is offered. You desperately need more staff and since you can't find new people, you resort to soliciting the staff at competing restaurants and offering them more money. They do the same to your employees. Average pay rises. You and the other owners don't like this at all. Cooking and serving was a minimum-wage job not too long ago! This steadily increasing pay is eating into your profits. So you all get together and agree to put a stop to it: you won't try to hire away their staff, and they won't try to hire away yours. Pay stagnates, and you and the other owners get to keep more of your profits. This is what happened with Apple and these other companies over time, only with computer people instead of cooks and servers. Is it immoral for businesses to collude to artificially hold down wages? I think most people would say yes. Probably more importantly, it's illegal.