[trysomething]

They could be, it's all relative of course. The most affected engineers in this case were likely the cream of the crop. It's in a way analogous to professional sports, where (if salaries were truly unrestricted) the very top players could easily demand a multiple of their already astronomical salaries. To combat this, some leagues like the NBA have 'salary caps' and 'maximum contracts'. You won't see the government going after this extremely obvious anti-worker collusion because there isn't much sympathy for multi-millionaire athletes. However, salaries for the best are almost certainly artificially low.

In a larger sense, argument isn't about what the affected workers "should" be paid, it's about who gets to decide: the potential recruits or their prospective employers.

As someone who believes that free markets generally "find a way" (in spite of information asymmetry), I'm hesitant to endorse the government's view point. One good thing that can come of this is more of these top-notch engineers get fed up with this sort of behaviour and start more startups. At the same time, I'm not going to shed any tears for Apple or Google if they lose in the courts.

[worldsoup]

these teams also have minimums they must spend on players and minimum salaries per player. in the MLB and NBA the player's unions are very powerful and salaries would likely fall without them (NFL is a different story)

[trysomething]

> salaries would likely fall without them

The median salary would likely fall, the mean would likely rise (or stay around the same) but the very top salaries would rise dramatically, in line with what these same players make on the free market as brand ambassadors.

This brings to light an uncomfortable truth: incentives are not really aligned for the very top talent and the majority of workers. To extend the sports analogy, Roger Federer recently opposed spreading prize money more equally in the grand slams, saying essentially that players should win more to get more money. (right now tennis prize money is essentially a power law distribution).