The real large scale wage thieves will go unpunished and wont even be challenged by the legal system. For months here at Pando, we’ve been reporting on Silicon Valley’s Techtopus, the wage-fixing cartel organized by Steve Jobs, George Lucas, Eric Schmidt, Bill Campbell, Meg Whitman and other superstar luminaries. According to experts’ models, just four Big Tech companies at the center of the Techtopus—Apple, Adobe, Google and Intel—effectively stole up to $3 billion in employee wages between 2005-2010. This doesn’t include the dozens of other companies who appear as co-conspirators, from Disney and Dreamworks Animation to IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Dell, WPP, Comcast and others named in secret internal company documents first revealed by Pando. But September’s massive crackdown on wage theft, the culmination of a year long investigation, was not aimed at those very real wage heists. Rather, the accused wage thieves are a handful of sleazy senior care home operators: A 76-year-old woman and her daughter and son-in-law; and a 61-year-old Filipino woman. In all, the care home operators are accused of stealing roughly $2 million in underpaid wages to some 60 care home workers — largely imported Filipino workers. ... Here then is a stark example of justice in greater Silicon Valley, the political economy of the future: Get caught red-handed by the Department of Justice stealing an estimated $3 billion dollars in wages from tens of thousands of employees — and your “punishment” is an agreement with the DOJ “that does not constitute admission by the Defendants that the law has been violated or of any issue of fact or law.” And, no fine. Let me repeat that: $3 billion in stolen wages; no admission of guilt, no fine. The only punishment is an agreement to submit to periodic checkups on compliance with antitrust law as regards to illegal wage-fixing cartels. (See the DOJ settlement sections labeled “Required Conduct” and “Compliance Inspection.”) Only eBay was slapped — more like flicked — with a $3.75 million fine, and only because eBay kept brushing off the DOJ’s “threats,” presumably because they didn’t find the DOJ’s no-guilt, no-fine “punishment” of Apple, Google et al particularly frightening. Considering that eBay’s 2013 revenues totaled over $16 billion, on $212 billion in “enabled commerce volume” — a $3.75 million fine is worth less than the pocket lint in Pierre Omidyar’s Bermuda shorts.
Posted on: Fri, 17 Oct 2014 21:03:21 +0000
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