That's called a "cartel", and the big problem with cartels is the members cheat on them under the table. They're unstable, unless maintained by force (i.e. using the law to punish members who cheat).
I recall one job I had where I was offered X, and I said X wasn't enough. They said they weren't officially allowed to pay more, but they would if I kept my mouth shut. Deal!
What is the basis for this assertion? Is this why OPEC exists?
Is that why in 2010 Department Of Justice had to step in to break up a wage suppression cartel between Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay
If it wasn't fpr the force of law, they would happily cooperate to drive you into poverty.
And this wage suppression was direct collusion, corporations have such an oligopoly now they hardly need to explicitly collude, both on wages or prices.
A company raises the price for something, and it's called 'price leadership', other companies recognize it is in their interest to follow suit and prices go up. The same dynamic exists for wages. Years of not enforcing anti-trust have left us in a pretty bad spot.
I'm not sure what you think inflation is, but it is just the prices of certain key items going up: food, housing, transportation are the main ones.
Corporations decide to set their prices higher, and you have a price inflation. We know that this is not merely a function of their inputs going up because many companies have been pulling in record profits during this time period. Nobody needs to meet in a smoke filled room for this to happen.
> And yet STEM graduates were getting $200K+ for their first jobs. How is that collusion working out?
You're being distracted with a nickel while your pockets are being emptied. It's all relative. Look at the cash big tech firms have in the bank. Google used 60B dollars to inflate their stock price this year with stock buybacks at the same time they laid of 6% of their workforce.
2021 was the most profitable year for big corporations since 1950, with pre-tax profits rising to $2.5 trillion and after-tax profits surging 35%, enabling the 1% to finally overtake the middle class in share of overall wealth.
OPEC has had a constant problem with cheaters selling oil under the table.
> Is that why in 2010 Department Of Justice had to step in to break up a wage suppression cartel between Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay
Yes, it was a cartel, and the companies were cheating on it. Remember when Jobs complained to Google that Google was cheating on it? There was nothing holding that cartel together.
> If it wasn't fpr the force of law, they would happily cooperate to drive you into poverty.
Cartels have never managed to do that, unless they were (ironically) enforced by law.
You should look up work of Steve Keen in the theory of the firm. It's actually the other way around, the oligopoly pricing is stable, while pricing that sets marginal cost to marginal revenue is unstable.
