SIdenote: ASML, Philips and other Dutch "big tech" are also known to make (illegal) cartel agreements on how much they will pay for labor.

Source: their (outsourced) recruiters admitting this to me.

Sidenote: most companies in most countries do this. They tend to align on a standard set of salary grills that are more or less the same between themselves to keep competition, wage increases and employee churn to the minimum.

This is of course illegal, but to counter this in court you need a whistleblower willing to go public, and since the workers actively involved in these wage fixing schemes are very well compensated, they have no reason to throw all that away in exchange for no other company hiring them ever again.

Is there any company anywhere that doesn't research the market rate for jobs to at least some degree? What you decide to do with that information is another matter of course but I'm well within my rights to decide not to pay anyone more than what I've determined to be the market rate no matter what other offers they claim to have in hand.

If you're the one setting the market rate, and there are no market forces to stop you, it becomes a big problem

As we can see from the current situation where the USA is completely reliant on foreign fabs and unable to make its own partly due to a shortage of skilled and willing labor

In the country I work it goes like this: the employers are members of an IT association, once a year each employer sends over the anonymous salaries for each job title. The associations aggregates them and sends back the distribution, which HR then uses as a reference. Similar result, but no direct collaboration between employers needed. You can even buy the report for each position as an employee for a fair price.

This sounds similar to what RealPage does in the U.S. with apartment rents: https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-r.... After the Propublica story came out, the U.S. Department of Justice started investigating it as essentially collusion-via-3rd-party.

Seems an odd argument. Essentially information transparency is bad.

Ah, that would be illegal!

What is NOT illegal is to all hire the same "outside consultants" who give you the same slide deck they give all the other employers, that "agrees" to the same wages giving them something to point at.

Isn't that grand?

There's worse, you could be making software for ASML. I've heard things worse than Oracle happen there.