"What you're describing is a conflict of interest that exists at the heart of capitalism. Owners want to pay less, employees want to make more."

Sure, and if workers conspired to illegally appropriate the profits from the company for themselves they'd go to prison. Plain and simple, rightfully so. Somehow if the company conspires to steal higher-paying job offers from their employees that's not particularly appalling or immoral to you? It's one step away from taking the money straight out of their wallets.

This was about about limiting active solicitation based on insider knowledge of who works there and your past relationships. This is a COMPLETELY LEGAL contract clause in most jurisdictions in the USA and Canada, just not enforceable in California.

So, instead, these companies had gentlemen's agreements, which I've seen in almost every industry everywhere across four countries. Note it wasn't just Apple and Palm - Adobe, Google, eBay, Intel, Intuit all were in on mutual verbal executive-level non-solicitation agreements.

Does that STEAL higher-paying job offers? Not at all. Employees were still free to apply to any publicly posted job offer at any company. This was about dissuading recruiters (and former executives!) from calling former colleagues to recruit them.

And no, none of this is appalling, immoral, in my opinion. It is debatably illegal under antitrust law, as the DOJ complaints in the past have stated. But antitrust law is rather controversial, (by far) not universally supported and is often enforced on purely political grounds. You'll recall Microsoft's (non) punishment after the last Republican administration was elected, for example.

Of course, the former employees trying to seek class action status have every right to argue that they lost wages as a result of these practices, which might hold water... mainly because it's California.