[WalterBright]

I've encountered companies with such agreements. They still do it, they just don't make it obvious.

Cartels like that are unstable, because each party has a massive incentive to cheat on it, and the advantage accrues to you.

[DarylZero]

That's why they organize into political groups and manipulate wages on the nation-state policy level.

Owner vs. worker power struggle is always all about who can better coordinate collective action. Owners have an inherent and mostly dominating coordination advantage.

[WalterBright]

In a free market, cartels are unstable. Cartels try to deal with this by making compliance required by law.

> Owner vs. worker power struggle

Oh phooey. Negotiation is inherent to a free market. It's not a power struggle. It's supply and demand.

[DarylZero]

> Cartels try to deal with this by making compliance required by law.

That's what I'm saying.

Except you have the wrong idea about stability, because the law itself is the cartel, and very stable.

> It's not a power struggle. It's supply and demand.

It's not supply and demand because it's about which side coordinates better!

Supply and demand, the labor market, and markets generally, exist within parameters determined by political collective action. The big owners generally get their way but there is some democratic pushback.

[WalterBright]

> Except you have the wrong idea about stability, because the law itself is the cartel, and very stable

Cartels on non-poaching are not enforced by the law.

> it's about which side coordinates better

That's what supply and demand is.

[DarylZero]

I'm not thinking of things like non-poaching but things like tuning the level of social benefits in order to control the supply of labor.

If the workers get too powerful, they starve them one way or another.

Back in the early 20th century the socialist radicals had ideas about making one giant union of all the workers. If they could coordinate every industry they could negotiate for everything!

The Labor Management Relations Act of 1947 (aka Taft-Hartley) made all such ideas quite simply illegal.

If unions get too powerful, unions will be hobbled.

If the market fails to deliver exploitable labor, the market will be fixed.

That's the context in which negotiation occurs.

[DarylZero]

Should have also mentioned tuning the number of H1Bs to control the supply of labor. More relevant to the audience here!

[diob]

Literally https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29834753