It wasn’t just Apple and Google — it seems to include Disney, Pixar and Dreamworks.
And here’s how that works:
In May, just days after the $324 million Techtopus settlement was reached, a major industry-funded report was published, claiming that more H-1B visas should be issued to foreign tech workers. This, they argued, would lead to higher wages for everyone in the tech industry. The report was funded by the Partnership for a New American Economy a powerful union of CEOs, founded by billionaire media oligarchs Michael Bloomberg (worth $34.4 billion) and Rupert Murdoch (worth $14.3 billion), and co-chaired by tech oligarch Steve Ballmer ($21 billion) and Disney CEO Iger, last year’s second highest-paid CEO ($34.3 million).
And this:
A secret no-poach agreement between Pixar and Dreamworks Animation would be particularly remarkable given the company’s famed fierce rivalry in almost all other areas. Even more significantly, the participation of Dreamworks Animation in an illegal wage-fixing cartel would take the politics of this story to a new level, considering the mega-millions in campaign donations that Dreamworks’ CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg has shoveled into the Obama campaign.
Yeah, I can see why they’re eager to settle this and keep it out of court.
OPEC is the largest price-fixing cartel in history. By extension this group also fixes industry wages and profits. The price of oil is set by the OPEC cartel. So when a politician claims that the price of gas or oil is increasing because the government is interfering in the free market, usually with regulations, they are simply lying. The profits of the OPEC members have been stable for decades. And the players haven’t really changed for a hundred years.