RE: Hourly Wages? Yes, I read that right after I sent that email. So I sort of answered my own question in relation to freedom of speech.
I went to the AntiTrust website and it seems to indicate that "The Division prosecutes serious and willful violations of the antitrust laws by filing criminal suits that can lead to large fines and jail sentences." I don't think we constitute a serious or willf ul violation of any law, since even if everyone here decided on a price fix, it wouldn't affect a noticeable portion of the market. It also talks about Price fixing conspiracies. I don't think that the handful of CF developers constitutes a conpiracy, nor do I have any information about anyone on the list that I could use to enforce penalites on if they violated a price fixing agreement, even if we all decided we were going to start one. In order for price fixing to work, there has to be penalites on the companies that violate the scheme. If I agree to set my price at $100 an hour, and everyone else on this list does also, we haven't affected the market enough to perform price fixing and there is no way for us to enforce it. I have a friend who is a CPA who goes to company sponsored trade organization meetings where they discuss pricing and how to calculate prices. So far, noone has shut that government regulated organization down. The brokers you mentioned who were prosecuted had to represent enough of the market that if they agreed to a price fix, then noone would be able to undercut them or compete with them. Just my two cents, which is less than what I normally charge for development. ;) -Craig ----- Original Message ----- From: Neil Giarratana To: 'Craig' Sent: Thursday, November 15, 2001 9:45 AM Subject: RE: Hourly Wages? Craig, It's ironic that you bring up freedom of speech as that's the next FAQ question on hwg.org (as follows). They speak of their official policy restricting free speech (which doesn't really apply on the cf list) but what's interesting to note is their reason behind the policy which is that their lawyers indicated there is precedence. They seem to suggest that anytime you get professionals from the same industry together and they start talking about what they charge per hour, it equates to price fixing. The reason seems to be that if I believed my service was worth a dollar and hour and you set your price at a dollar because that's what I charge, then we have arbitrarily fixed the price of the market. Do these types of conversations go on, of course. However, for it to be documented with a paper(less?) trail is a little more fodder than I would want to give investigators (if it were to come to that). Anyway, the link to the full doc is http://www.hwg.org/resources/faqs/priceFAQ.html. Regards, Neil Doesn't freedom of speech allow me the freedom to say anything I want? Short answer: NO Use of the Guild's mailing lists is a privilege, not a right; in return for this privilege, you are asked to follow a few simple rules. The "freedom of speech" guarenteed by the U.S. Constitution only protects you from governmental intervention in your right to express yourself -- it doesn't give you free reign to use computer resources against the wishes of their owner. Our lawyer friends have kindly (and in self-survival) pointed out that the Federal Law system in the U.S. and Canada consider pricing discussions by professional organizations to be price fixing which is a federal offense. This "consideration" position has been successfully proven in court. Some of you have argued that other guilds and unions publish price guidelines based upon the stated prices charged by members. Guides are not discussions. Those guides have all company specific information stripped from them, every service has a range of prices associated with it, the prices are compiled and the contributors have become anonymous to the process. How the guide is used is up to the individual reader. What the HTML Writers Guild has forbid is discussion of prices. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Structure your ColdFusion code with Fusebox. Get the official book at http://www.fusionauthority.com/bkinfo.cfm ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ To Unsubscribe visit http://www.houseoffusion.com/index.cfm?sidebar=lists&body=lists/cf_jobs or send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with 'unsubscribe' in the body.
