If you're a CEO of a large company worried about the impact that poaching will have on your company and on the industry as a whole, you don't have to sit around and wait for the churn to eventually stop when the market price stabilized. You can go out and make it happen by paying your people better.
We agree that there is some salary level where that constant churn of poaching doesn't happen, right? As you said, people generally like to stay where they are. That means that poaching will only work if you can offer something substantially better. When employees are paid well enough that it's not worth paying them substantially better just to convince them to leave their current job, the poaching churn will stop.
If Jobs wanted to stop the poaching churn without being evil and without breaking the law, it would have been easy: go out and figure out what that salary level is, and start paying it. Or heck, he wouldn't even have to go that far. If we assume that the "no poaching" level is vastly higher than current salaries, all he'd have to do is pay, say, 50% higher than the other companies around, then keep an eye on things and continue bumping up compensation if and when other companies started to follow along.
I don't see how that scenario has any negative outcomes for anyone besides shareholders and executives who counted on being able to pay $1 to an employee in return for $10 of value forever. There would be no feelings of resentment and betrayal, no combative emotional stances, because none of the churn you describe would happen.
Faced with poaching, Jobs had three alternatives. He could ignore it, he could collude with other companies to stop it, or he could pay his people well enough to make the problem go away. The only reason to choose collusion over better pay is to save money by giving less of it to your workers.
We agree that there is some salary level where that constant churn of poaching doesn't happen, right? As you said, people generally like to stay where they are. That means that poaching will only work if you can offer something substantially better. When employees are paid well enough that it's not worth paying them substantially better just to convince them to leave their current job, the poaching churn will stop.
If Jobs wanted to stop the poaching churn without being evil and without breaking the law, it would have been easy: go out and figure out what that salary level is, and start paying it. Or heck, he wouldn't even have to go that far. If we assume that the "no poaching" level is vastly higher than current salaries, all he'd have to do is pay, say, 50% higher than the other companies around, then keep an eye on things and continue bumping up compensation if and when other companies started to follow along.
I don't see how that scenario has any negative outcomes for anyone besides shareholders and executives who counted on being able to pay $1 to an employee in return for $10 of value forever. There would be no feelings of resentment and betrayal, no combative emotional stances, because none of the churn you describe would happen.
Faced with poaching, Jobs had three alternatives. He could ignore it, he could collude with other companies to stop it, or he could pay his people well enough to make the problem go away. The only reason to choose collusion over better pay is to save money by giving less of it to your workers.