As soon as someone pulls the trigger and starts poaching it gets exponentially more expensive for these companies to operate.
This is the Prisoner's Dilemma, plain and simple.
It's not really, but that is an enlightening comparison. Using the prisoner's dilemma as an analogy for this hiring situation, the employees aren't players (prisoners, if you prefer) at all. Which is exactly the problem.
That just gives you the reason why two companies would want to collude and would have to agree to collude to get the best outcome for both companies.
I agree the more important issue is as you say; the legal and moral aspects are what they are because of the fact that employees are being treated as resources or pawns. But that means that we are happy to see a prisoners dilemma dynamic here, it means that there has to be some type of collusion to make this dynamic happen. Collusion is explicit and detectable. Much better than the various other types of exploitative dynamics that are emergent.
Okay, but the problem itself is different. In a classic prisoner's dilemma the players cannot know how the other will decide and so they act in the manner which benefits them the most. When pursuing their interests they both rat out their accomplice, with the ironic outcome that neither avoids punishment.
> But that means that we are happy to see a prisoners dilemma dynamic here, it means that there has to be some type of collusion to make this dynamic happen. Collusion is explicit and detectable.
Okay, but the collusion is why it's not a classic prisoner's dilemma, I would think.
Also, we're not that happy. The collusion means the companies can avoid punishing one another prisoner's dilemma style. Great for the companies but bad for the employees, since "punishment" in this context involves... hiring.
If your employees are under pure default at-will employment, its not poaching to seek to hire them out from under you, because you haven't purchased a property interest in their continuing to remain your employees. And, if you have purchased such an interest, then you suddenly don't need a no-poaching agreement to prevent them from being poached.
A multiparty no poaching agreement with the other main employers in the industry -- particularly a secret one -- is essentially trying to impose the restriction of having an extended contract with your employees without paying them for accepting that restriction.
The ability to do that is HIGHLY restricted by labor laws. I'm not saying you couldn't get around it with very careful contracting... but I wouldn't want to count on it.
The ability to do that under the law is demonstrated by the fact that there are whole major industries where this kind of contracting with talent is normal. (Legal limitations tend to highly restrict the ability to get a remedy beyond money damages for breaches of such agreements, to be sure, but they don't tend to prevent the agreements themselves.)
It tends to be expensive (both in terms of what you pay the talent and in terms of the overhead associated with contracting), but if the talent is really valuable enough, that's the price you pay.
If you aren't willing to pay that price, you shouldn't complain about people "poaching" what you didn't want to pay the cost to have a durable claim to in the first place.
If a company sold a widget that routinely generated $500k in profit per year each and leased it for $125k/year, would it make business sense to keep it at that price? Hell no! Charge as much as the market will bear. That's just supply and demand.
[1] http://nypost.com/2014/02/28/apple-has-biggest-slice-of-prof...
Imagine if Apple had to pay $300K per employee what kind of a landscape that would be. Nobody but Apple could afford to hire anyone.
If employees getting a lower salary enables a company to take risks, doesn't that mean the employees are shouldering the risk?
I can understand why large company CEOs would want to do this. I can even empathize with them and imagine myself wanting to this were I in their situation. I can also see how this affects employees, though, and why employers shouldn't be allowed to do so.
Either way, it would surprise me if people who are otherwise happy at their company would randomly switch to a partner company unless either: a) the salary offered were significantly (>30% or so) higher than at their current company for similar work in similar conditions (meaning they are undervalued or undercompensated at their current company), b) the other company looked much more promising a place to work for or offered a much better position (in terms of autonomy or career advancement). Pretty sure the solution there is just to compensate your employees fairly and make their work conditions on par with the standard for similar workers in the industry (or better, if possible).
It's kind of like a union in some regard. No wonder companies don't like it.
