How Apple, Google, and other tech companies conspired against their own workers
So I was at one of these companies when the scandal broke.  I didn't get screwed quite so much as my coworkers, since I'd only been working there for a year or so.  The settlement was a joke - I got about $1100, but my compensation increased by roughly $100K/year the year after the cartel broke, and kept rising.  Can't say I'm terribly pleased about either the wage-fixing or the settlement, but...<p>My wife works in philanthropy, and one of her jobs is investing in homeless shelters.  We were talking the other day about how the Bay Area's housing/homelessness crisis is a <i>direct</i> consequence of the collapse of the high-tech wage-fixing cartel.  Before 2010, the wage distribution from one of these huge companies was that founders and VCs would make billions, ~1000 early employees would end up with millions, and the rest of the employees live comfortable upper-middle-class lifestyles.  The ~1000 employees who could cash out pre-IPO stock options would bid up prices in Hillsborough/Atherton/PacHeights/Woodside to ~$5M, but the rest of the Bay Area would be priced at what an ordinary professional could afford.  After the cartel broke, the compensation structure changed so we have ~100K engineers each making ~$300-400K/year.  That's enough to buy <i>all</i> the available housing inventory in the region.  So now house prices in Mountain View and Sunnyvale go from $800K -> $2.4M, and you must be a dual-tech-income family to afford a house.<p>I say this not to imply that the cartel was a good thing (cartels are bad, and I'd much rather the solution be greater wage equality for everyone and building more housing so everyone can stay in the area), but to highlight the problem of unintended consequences.  I've seen many people ask "Why don't companies hire remote workers at Silicon Valley wages?" and in the same breath say "Because I would never move to the third-world hellhole that the Bay Area has become", not realizing that if they <i>did</i> hire remote workers, <i>the same thing would happen in their communities</i>.  Inflation is the flip side of higher wages; when everybody gets paid more, everything costs more.