> If you can collude on layoffs, that means industry demand for labor is down and salaries are reflecting lowered demand.
No it doesn't. You make a "gentleman's agreement" to do your layoffs and trust your chums to keep to it. Are you arguing that industry collusion is impossible?
Yes, because companies need labor. They aren't going to willingly crash their growth if the economy is booming and other industries are growing, because that will destroy themselves. It is insanely better to shed labor when the economy is poor than when the economy is great.
When you shed labor during poor economic conditions, it is not collusion, even if they, hypothetically, "colluded" to do it.
When a bunch of people see that a stock is crashing and decide to pull out together, it is not stock manipulation. It is a rational decision. (And don't nitpick the analogy on things like "buy low sell high", you probably understand the point I'm making.)
Companies need some labour, sure. But they can absolutely do things like hiring 10% more or 10% less, bringing a layoff forward a few months or pushing it back.
> When you shed labor during poor economic conditions, it is not collusion, even if they, hypothetically, "colluded" to do it.
> When a bunch of people see that a stock is crashing and decide to pull out together, it is not stock manipulation. It is a rational decision.
That's backwards logic. If a bunch of people agree to sell a stock at the same time so that none of them are left holding the bag, that is stock manipulation, even if they sold at a time when it was "rational" to sell. The fact that companies can act as a de-facto cartel without the kind of explicit coordination that our current anaemic anti-trust regime might punish is an argument for stronger anti-trust laws, not for ignoring the cases when we do catch them red-handed.
The "silicon valley anti-poaching agreement" is a known case where it happened a few years ago. So it's not too implausible to think that the current round of layoffs might be being coordinated in a similar way.
All you have to do is look at how these things play out. One large company announces they're considering layoffs, which primes everyone else to compile their own lists.
After a month or two one company announces they're going through with layoffs, and that sets off a chain reaction for the rest to execute their own plans as soon as possible. It always happens like this. Everyone just decides now is the time to clean house, all at the same time, and we all decided to do this independent of each other...
The "collusion" is a dog-whistle protocol happening in plain sight. There is no "evidence," no damning email to be found, only behavioral patterns to observe. It's the same playbook every single time.
(which is to say that is just natural market forces, not collusion)