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Judge Denies Dismissal of No-Poach Conspiracy Case
theodp writes "Testifying before Congress in 2007, Google's HR chief stated: 'We make great efforts to uncover the most talented employees we can find.' But according to the U.S. Dept. of Justice, Google actually went to some lengths to avoid uncovering some of tech's most talented employees, striking up agreements with Apple, Intel, and other corporations to avoid recruiting each other's employees. On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Lucy H. Koh ruled that Google, Apple, Intel, Adobe, Disney, Pixar, Intuit and Lucasfilm must face a lawsuit claiming they violated antitrust laws by entering into no-poaching agreements with each other. 'I don't want to see any obstruction on discovery,' Koh told lawyers during a hearing. According to the head attorney representing the plaintiffs, the total damages could exceed $150 million if just 10,000 entry-level engineers were affected."
It's not about the consumers, it's about turning employees into slaves.
If companies do not compete for employees then they are stifling salaries and playing people less simply because they have a monopoly set up.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Even if current employees don't see a dime of the damages, the ruling should affect all current and future employees who should now be better assured that they will get a competitive salary. If employers fail to compensate their employees fairly, there is now the ability to switch employers freely, like the law requires.
There should be a moderation category "Dumbest Comment EVER"
this isn't about monopoly power; it's about workplace discrimination. If I apply for a job, it's illegal for the employer to deny me the job capriciously, including the fact that they have a side agreement with their competitors not to hire me.
So you're saying that if you worked for Pixar you would be perfectly happy that Lucasfilm can't come and make you a better offer.
Yeah, you might end up having to work on another Star Wars prequel.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Yup. People sucked down this motto and believed it. The fast is that the nature of business is often contrary to the general public interest. This is why we citizens band together in the form of governments to counterbalance some of the negative side of business. No, this isn't a diatribe against capitalism. It is simple a recognition that capitalism has its weaknesses that must be addressed and reckoned with.
Put two saints in charge of a business and you will find that they begin behaving in ways that the wouldn't if they weren't in a powerful position. it doesn't make them evil. It is simply a response to the environment and the forces around them. Our gov't should place restraints in place to minimize anti-society behavior.
When Google puts in the "no poaching" agreement, it is acting in its own best interest, but not in the best interest of society as a whole. Citizens should be free to work in the best environment for them. This isn't a profit driven value. It is a freedom based value. Google is acting against that and should be slapped in the language that corporations understand -- the bottom line. The slap must be hard enough to change behavior, or else it will be deemed a cost of doing business.
And if you still think that we just need the right people in charge of companies, people with the right ethics and then everything will be perfect, you are absolutely deluded. Granted, we DO need strong ethics in those who hold power. But be damned sure that even those people will act against the interest of the rest of us.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
It is short sighted to assume that this is just about well paid programmers. Employment law applies to all corporations. If it were legal for high value employers like Google etc. to conspire to drive down wages, then it would also be legal for low value employers to conspire and do likewise. It could easily be the case that, in certain geographic regions or areas of industry, there would only be a few potential employers for certain classes of worker, and collusion between these employers could drive wages down to minimum wage, or even down to an unliveable wage for places that don't have a minimum.
The market for employees is just like any other functioning market. Companies colluding to reduce competition in the marke makes the market less efficient. If you are an economist, or just a person who favors capitalism and competitive markets, then you should be against this.
Even worse, parts of the allegations verge on blackballing: it's alleged that when an employer from company A applied to a job at company B, where A & B were part of the "no-poaching" collusion agreement, company B would not only refuse to hire them to avoid poaching, but actually rat the employee out to company A, telling them that this employee tried to apply for a job.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
It's not actually legal for unions to do it; the "closed shop", where new hires can only come from the labor union's membership pool, is illegal in the U.S. since 1947.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I'm sorry, but 10x average salary. Hmm, I'm an engineer. Average salary is somewhere around 45K a year. I don't know any that make 450K a year. I would say 2x isn't uncommon, and some of the highly compensated might make 3x average, but 10x, no.
But then comes the muddying of the water. First, we do a job that very few can do. The drop out rate in school is >70% of the people who attempt to earn the degrees. Further than that, I don't have a number, but a fairly large percentage enter the work world, and discover they can't handle it. This leaves a very small number of people who can actually produce as an engineer. Toss in that EVERYTHING needs to be engineered. Whether due to nature of the product or due to regulation, this is just a fact of life. This creates high demand and low supply, which leads to our seemingly high pay.
But wait, now for such a needed profession, then it turns out, we're actually not highly paid, even relative to what we do. For some odd reason, especially in tech, the companies are always locals with high cost of living. This means, comparing the salary of an engineer to a farmer in the mid-west isn't really fair. Compare an engineers salary to the average in the bay area, that'd be more fair. And then of course, the average american works on average of 38-39 hours a week. The typical engineer looks at 40 hours longingly. We're all salaried employees, which means we don't get overtime, and 50 per week is fairly normal. My last job, I would regularly crack 65 and even had a couple months where I was averaging 80 hours a week. People who've never worked 80 hours really can't grasp it. I never thought 80 would be much until I did it. that's 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. You literally get up, get dressed, drive to work, work, drive home, eat dinner, get ready for bed, and sleep. That's it. For double, or MAYBE triple the national average salary. And then you throw in companies that try to hinder people trying to improve their lot a little.
You'll undoubtedly say "well, if you don't like it, then leave", but that mentality ignores some very important factors. Engineers are an odd assortment. First, we typically genuinely love what we do. We don't mind working 50 hours a week, because we love it, but that doesn't mean we don't get exhausted. Also, our work ethic is typically top notch, and we have a huge amount of pride in what we do. We take ownership in what we create and it hurts us to abandon it. We also put up with an amazing amount of BS. A lot of companies understand this, and use it to their advantage to basically turn us into slaves. Yes, not in the literal sense, but by taking advantage of our idiosyncrasies, they effectively do.
Of course it should be. People should not be locked into one employer just because any potential employer in their field has a No Poach agreement with their current employer. It seems ridiculous now, but as these companies get larger, and their reach and influence gets larger, it's only going to get worse.
If things like this are allowed to stand, how long will it be before you're basically locked into an employer for life? People laugh at the rhetoric that gets thrown around these days, like indentured servants, or serfs, but really, what else could you call employees in a situation like this? And what recourse would employees have? Leave their field entirely? Or the deliberately ignorant "Start your own business, then!!" that is thrown around whenever anyone complains about their employer these days?
It never ceases to amaze me how much the common man will fight against his own self-interest. In what possible way could these No Poach agreements benefit anyone that is not a C-level executive at any of these companies?
Not just unenforceable, but actually prohibited in California (where all this anti-poach activity is going on)..
However, there are devious ways to achieve the same result: Allege that the leaving employee possesses trade secret knowledge that will inevitably be disclosed. Whether or not that's true (and the courts tend to say it's not), the threat of litigation accompanying your hiring that person tends to have a chilling effect on the whole thing.
Hey, you can't always be on the winning side of at-will firing.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
How is this any different from a union? And if it's okay for unions to do it, why isn't it okay for companies?
Same reply as the last time this nonsense was posted. If it is Ok for a three year old kid to hit and kick an adult man as hard as possible, shouldn't it be Ok for an adult man to hit and kick a three year old kid as hard as possible?
Exactly. What happens when Walmart, Target, ShopKo, Best Buy, and every other big box retailer do the same thing? What happens when every major employer in a given field starts doing this?
This kind of crap has too much of a feudalistic flavor for me to stomach...
... Google, Apple...
They aren't allies.
Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt were actually good friends for a while. Schmidt was even on Apple's board, until he had to leave when Google bought Android and it created a conflict of interest. That was one of the reasons Jobs was so mad about Android -- he felt like it was busting up his friendship.
Incidentally, if you want to help me test a hypothesis, try paying attention to the media coverage of this story to see how much the MPAA-owned media cover this story with Google as the principal antagonist/coordinator of the scheme and Apple as a secondary or unimportant player now that Google has gone to bat for us against SOPA, even though it was Steve Jobs who started the ball rolling on this whole no poach thing. Pay special attention to News Corp coverage (e.g. Fox News and the Wall Street Journal) -- my hypothesis is that Murdoch has it in for Google now and is executing a campaign against them. Let's see if I'm right.
No, no. It's ok to do that to the lower classes, because this keeps costs down, which lets the upper classes get more. This increase in wealth will eventually trickle down to the lower classes in the form of more shitty, underpaid jobs. Because, you know, companies just hire people out of the goodness of their hearts when they have more money. It has nothing to do with the level of demand at all.