[shadowgovt]

Ultimately, this is why we have regulation: because if behavior is allowed that lowers the cost to do business, businesses in a highly competitive space will eventually do it.

It's important to hold regulators responsible for policing these companies, because otherwise market forces will tend to drag quality-of-life down for employees.

(Whether no-poaching agreements should be considered price-fixing is a separate question, but assuming they are, they must be enforced or the end result is employee harm across the industry, because prices are a function of what the competitor will pay too).

[dahart]

I fully agree about the need for regulation, especially because it matters more in other commodity industries (farming, food, construction, etc.) much more than it does in computer graphics.

There wasn’t a noticeable reduction in my own quality of life, but that’s not to say others didn’t feel it, nor that it wouldn’t have happened left unchecked, I don’t know.

Once after a movie’s crunch time, I wanted to trade my accumulated overtime bonus for comp time (time off) instead. The studio refused, and I was initially upset but then discovered that in California it was illegal for them to agree to it. The reason is that labor jobs in the past had abused comp time by rewarding employees who were working too much with forced time off in which they weren’t getting paid. This would be awful for farm workers or any labor job, really, and more damaging the lower the pay. I’m happy this law is protecting them even when I didn’t want it applied to me.