Why is conspiracy the issue? Murder and unreasonably low wages sounds like the actual crime to me. Regulate that instead of regulating a chat over dinner.
You seem to be wondering why the act of conspiracy to commit a crime is itself a crime on top of the crime you conspired to commit.
The reason is the Mafia. They stuck around for such a long time in part because the bosses never committed any crimes themselves, and were often careful to never even directly order anyone else to commit crimes. Nonetheless, they were in charge, and it was quite well understood by the rest of the conspirators exactly what they wanted. But it was effectively impossible for law enforcement to stop them, and that meant there was no way to stop the actual crimes because the supply of lower-level people willing to commit them for sufficient compensation was effectively infinite.
We finally managed to bring them down in part by making conspiracy to commit crime itself be a crime. This was called the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act or RICO and was passed in the US in 1970. From that point forward, it has been a crime to influence others to commit crimes, and enhanced sentencing is available in cases where this is done as part of an ongoing criminal conspiracy.
Well, define "unreasonably low wages", in isolation, in the legal sense. You can't, really, at least not beyond talking about minimum wage for hourly workers (which is obviously not what we're talking about here).
In this case the wages were "unreasonable" because they were lower than they would have been without the collusion. If there hadn't been collusion, but the companies independently came to the same numbers on wages, they would not have been unreasonable, by definition.
The purpose of these laws is to protect workers from people who have a lot more economic and employment power than the workers. That's why it's "collusion to lower wages" and not just "lowering wages". The latter is (generally) legal as long as it's not accompanied by the former.
You go inspect the life of an delivery driver. If they are struggling to pay rent, eat healthy, or get a reasonable amount of legally-mandated family time and sleep because they are having to work excess hours, their wages are too low. Have a judge mandate an increase in their wages by some value. PID feedback loop on that legally-mandated bonus until their lifestyle becomes acceptable.
Do this for a random sample of people and establish a per-county minimum wage.
If the judge doesn't understand how to deal with a simple feedback loop, fire them and replace them with an engineer. A backend engineer who has to regularly deal with actually solving problems around allocating resources and making sure processes don't die is probably a perfect fit.
You can chat all you want with your friends over coffee about stealing stuff and although it's psychologically messed up, there's nothing legally wrong about that. It's when you actually steal that you've committed a crime. Same thing.
Taking the tech wage collusion example, the wages themselves were still very high (we're talking about Google and Apple salaries here) but the collusion to keep them from being higher was still a crime.
Tech CEOs can talk about whatever they want. The talking isn't the crime it's the act. They could talk in theory about colluding, it becomes illegal when they DO it. I'm not sure how else to explain it.
The reason is the Mafia. They stuck around for such a long time in part because the bosses never committed any crimes themselves, and were often careful to never even directly order anyone else to commit crimes. Nonetheless, they were in charge, and it was quite well understood by the rest of the conspirators exactly what they wanted. But it was effectively impossible for law enforcement to stop them, and that meant there was no way to stop the actual crimes because the supply of lower-level people willing to commit them for sufficient compensation was effectively infinite.
We finally managed to bring them down in part by making conspiracy to commit crime itself be a crime. This was called the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act or RICO and was passed in the US in 1970. From that point forward, it has been a crime to influence others to commit crimes, and enhanced sentencing is available in cases where this is done as part of an ongoing criminal conspiracy.