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New York Times editorial points out that software engineers and fast food workers are
more similar than we might think: Both groups are affected by wage theft.
In the days ahead, a settlement is expected in the antitrust lawsuit pitting 64,613 software engineers against Google, Apple, Intel and Adobe. The engineers say they lost up to $3 billion in wages from 2005-9, when the companies colluded in a scheme not to solicit one another’s employees. The collusion, according to the engineers, kept their pay lower than it would have been had the companies actually competed for talent. [...]
The case essentially alleges white-collar wage theft. The engineers were not victimized by the usual violations of labor law, but by improper hiring practices against their interests. The result, however, was the same: Money that would have flowed to workers in the form of wages went instead into corporate coffers and from there to executives and shareholders.
The software engineers presumably made a decent living despite being cheated by their employers, which can't be said of fast food workers forced to work off the clock or not being paid overtime when they work more than 40 hours a week. But their case highlights something middle-class Americans would do well to remember: The corporate race to the bottom on wages and working conditions is coming for you, too. In fact, it probably already has, in the form of the decline of the pension and stagnant wages except at the very top. And when you fail to give a damn about the fast food worker, unless they trot out
a convincing enough tale of noble poverty or dismiss the public worker's struggle for the pension they earned with "well, I don't have a pension, why should a janitor?" or scoff at the idea that software engineers and fast food workers share a common interest against the massive corporations that employ them, you're inviting that race to the bottom to hit you sooner and harder.