When I was being recruited by ASML this is what I thought. Investing all the time, money and energy, to then be at the mercy of one employer, and have to live in a very specific locations, and the salary is not even that great.
Sidenote: most companies in most countries do this. They tend to align on a standard set of salary grills for the region, that are more or less the same between each other, to keep competition, wage increases and employee churn to the minimum.
This is of course illegal in most places, but to counter this in court you need a whistleblower willing to go public and expose them with hard evidence, but since the workers actively involved in these wage fixing schemes are very well compensated along with NDAs, they have no reason to throw all that away in exchange for no other company hiring them ever again and your ex employer suing your for breaching your NDA. Sure, you might eventually win in court, but do you really want to drag your family through expensive lawsuits against mega-corporations who spend more on toilet paper than you can on a lawyer?
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.
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.
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
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.
