Comment by jasode
5 months ago
Competitors making similar price adjustments or salary adjustments based on seeing each other's public announcements or sharing data is legal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_collusion
That's why it's "legal tacit collusion" when one leading law firm announces salary increases and other law firms immediately match it: https://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/large-law-firms-...
That type of salary matching has been happening for decades.
What's illegal is competitors making agreements with each other to set wages -- via secret emails, etc.
Yes, but the information here is not public, since it's being sold as a service.
If it were public, employees and job seekers would also have the information.
Huh, this tacit collusion being legal thing is mind boggling.
The law firm example seems imperfect though. Publicly announcing that you’re raising salaries isn’t really the same as internally sharing that data and choosing to set the same salary based on that.
>Huh, this tacit collusion being legal thing is mind boggling.
Not really ... If you're looking to hire workers in a particular region, how do you know what a competitive wage is? Well ... you look at what similar firms are paying their workers. How do you know what similar firms are paying their workers? You read surveys, industry reports, public statements, etc.
Nothing about any of that means you cannot offer a higher or lower salary for the same position.
Information is either internally confidential or it's not. If the latter then it's very reasonable to expect other firms to take actions based on that information.
> when one leading law firm announces salary increases and other law firms immediately match it
Because it's public so doesn't reduce the amount of bargaining power employes have and therefore distort the market. Which is the main problem here.