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by shadowgovt 2289 days ago
Right. The answer in the large is "They'd decide animation is a sucker's game and do something else entirely." Which they could do, and that's the natural back-pressure on wage-fixing cartels driving prices to zero (as opposed to the "unnatural" back-pressure of laws that say "companies aren't allowed to collude on fixing wages", which almost universally translates to "... in ways we can see," because every major industry with a few players and a non-union staff does it somehow. To be clear, I think those laws are wise, but they're a sub-optimal solution because they're very easily gamed and the ROI for gaming them is very, very high).

There were not many Google engineers who felt actually slighted by Google when the company was fined for price-fixing along with Apple, Pixar, eBay, &c. At least, if they did feel slighted, they sure didn't demonstrate their frustration by unionizing, leaving, or actually taking more action than accepting their one-time payoff from the class-action settlement. And why would they? They're already paid far above average wages for employees countries Google operates in (and significantly above most of the tech sector in the US).

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In the case of the Google wage-fixing cartel, it was partially broken even before the lawsuit by Facebook, which was not part of the cartel and hired away enough Google engineers that Google had to raise wages for the entire company in 2011.