User:So1962/sandbox

Hiring collusion
Hiring collusion is different from the forms of wage thefts listed above because it relies on the denial of prospect wage raises that someone can expect in the course of one’s professional career. Collusion is a dishonest agreement between two parties (persons, institutions or organizations) to mislead a third one. It implies a deliberate attempt to prejudice a third party by breaking the balance of bargaining powers. When such agreements are secret their are known as tacit collusion. In economy, collusion really often involves price or wage fixing in an attempt to trespass antitrust law. Drawing on it,hiring collusion designates an agreement between companies not to solicit one another’s employees. It is different from Non-compete clause which aims at preventing one party to engage in commercial activities competing with the other. Non compete clause is usually found in a contract between employers and employees to prevent the latter from joining a competing firms immediately after their resignation. Whereas non compete clause is part of contract law and thus willingly accepted and negotiated by both parties; hiring collusion is secretive and creates a situation with asymmetric bargaining powers giving the advantage to one party over the other. Companies have recourse to hiring collusion in order to manage competition and maintain their monopole on a given market. By agreeing not to solicit each other’s employees, their shape labor demand according to their own interests preventing wages from being the adjustment variable of a free and competitive labor market. Therefore, the absence of competition within the demand maintains wages artificially low working as wage theft. This is what was claimed in the 2013 class action lawsuit High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation filed by over 64 000 software engineers against Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Lucas Film and Pixar. The plaintiffs (all former employees of the previously cited companies) alleged that their salaries were kept down by the collusion of their companies not to solicit one another’s employees between 2005 and 2009 in violation of Section 1 15 U.S.C §1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act and Section 4 15 U.S.C § 15 of the Clayton Antitrust Act .They argued that in a functioning labor market, defendants would have been competing by soliciting each other’s employee through what they referred as “cold calling”. In the certiorari order granting the case class action lawsuit; the Northern district court of California defined “cold calling” as a hiring technique consisting in “communicating directly in any manner- including orally, in writing, telephonically or electronically- with another company’s employee who has not otherwise applied for a job”. Plaintiffs argued that “cold calling” is a strategic bargaining tool for employees granting them the power to negotiate wage promotions or accept higher paid jobs. Hence, collusion on cold calling directly affected their professional mobility and the possibilities of wage raises that come with it. So in this case, plaintiffs did not think about wage theft as the actual salary they should have received for the work accomplished but instead as a hold on what they could have earned. They estimated the loss to $3 billion in wages and asked the tech companies to pay them back. Eventually, the defendants avoided a trial announcing on April 24, 2014 that they had filed a letter with US District Judge Lucy Koh settling the lawsuit. The terms of the settlement haven’t been disclosed but are estimated to $300 million dollars which equates to 1/10 of the estimated loss

Other forms
Whereas all jobs can potentially been affected by wage theft, studies have shown that low wage workers in the USA are the most vulnerable given their poor bargaining leverage. Relying on a landmark survey of 4,387 workers in the low wage industries in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York, |the Broken laws, unprotected workers study released in 2009 found that “76 percent of the sounded workers were not paid the legally required overtime rate by their employers”. However, the development of the Internet Industry and the new job opportunities that came with it challenged this reality. The dematerialization of work as well as social relation characterizing the rise of the Internet made labor law and worker’s protection harder to implement. Scholars such as Marwick and Terranova thought about the Web 2.0 as the cradle of new forms of “unpaid labors” or “free labors” which could enlarge the scope of wage theft. In Chapter 4 of Status Update, Marwick argues that social media turned self presentation into a branding strategy. She defines self branding as “a series of marketing strategies applied to the individual [ …] a way of thinking about the self as a salable commodity that can tempt a potential employer” p.166. She supports her argument through the analysis of Gary Vaynerchuk and Tim Ferriss's professional career; two American entrepreneurs whose fame and success rely on a highly efficient use of social media. Marwick explains that self branding leads to the creation of an “edited self” p.196 which require permanent attention. According to her, the intertwining of the private and professional sphere characterizing self branding leads to a continuous “ brandmonitoring” p.191 that she refers to as “immaterial and emotional labor” p.196 falling into the sphere of “unpaid labor”. p.191. Therefore, Marwick’s analysis of self-branding could be understood as a contemporary form of wage theft endorsing the neoliberal individualization and privatization of economic risk