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Judge Denies Class Action Status In Tech Workers' Lawsuit
We've mentioned a few times the "gentleman's agreements" which some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley used to reduce the risk of employee poaching. walterbyrd writes "This comes from the same judge who awarded Apple $1 billion from Samsung. 'A federal judge on Friday struck down an effort to form a class action lawsuit to go after Apple, Google and five other technology companies for allegedly forming an illegal cartel to tamp down workers' wages and prevent the loss of their best engineers during a multiyear conspiracy broken up by government regulators.'" The lawsuit itself is ongoing (thanks to a ruling last year by the same judge); it's just that the plaintiff's claims cannot be combined.
But they're mere workers.
They're a cash grab for the filing law firm, who rake 40 percent of the settlement and then post instructions on how everyone affected can file for peanuts, probably surrendering some privacy in the process. The settlement usually has the property that it represents a small fraction of the actual damages, but 40 percent of it is enough to handsomely compensate the plaintiff's lawyers.
I've gotten several notices over the years about how to claim my share of a settlement - I've passed on all of them after a quick examination.
Judges are part of the ruling class. Oh wait, America doesn't have class, right? And it's certainly not true that 95% of political donations come from .05% of Americans, right?
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We all know what happens when prices go up without bound. Think about it. Programmers jumping around from job to job while their salaries keep soaring. Eventually they're asking for so much money that companies decide to just not hire them. Bring in more H1-B's, Salaries plummet, and in the end we all lose... I think it's best to keep control and prevent an 'engineers market flash crash'.
Documents filed in the lawsuit indicated executives knew they were behaving badly. Both [Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Google] Schmidt and Intel CEO Paul Otellini indicated that they were worried about the anti-recruiting agreements being discovered, according to declarations cited in Koh's ruling. Nevertheless, Schmidt still fired a Google recruiter who riled Jobs by contacting an Apple employee, according to evidence submitted in the case.
Well that seems a bit evil, wouldn't you say?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Hideki!
Programmers jumping around from job to job while their salaries keep soaring. Eventually they're asking for so much money that companies decide to just not hire them.
That's not true where I live. Maybe out in CA - which I think the tech market in Silicon is in it's own little World.
Salaries peaked in the late 90s- early - '00s. And that happened to be when :
Globalization really took off.
Changes in technology. Most of work I had in the late 90s was distributed systems on Unix/Linux/Windows - writing the middle ware (in C++), the data transfer to RDBMs, and other stuff that folks just don't do anymore.
Really, who writes their own middleware anymore? They go with a solution from IBM, MS, Oracle, SAP or something these days. Or internet solutions. So there is less demand for programmers.
I think if the Silicon Valley companies look outside of their little World and realize that, for one, their technology isn't so groundbreaking after all, and for another, maybe could move development operations to let's say, Metro Atlanta where Lockheed just canned a bunch of really talented guys? And the cost of living is a fraction of out in the Bay area so that a coder can make a living on $70K/ year - even it IS a cut in pay from the '00s, it's at least a job. But then again, the businesses where I live offer real products and services that actually contribute to the economy - not high profile fluff. Here you'll work on an integration with others systems or something else that allows someone to do a job. Not for someone to indulge their narcissism; which seems to be the major business of Silicon Valley these.days.
tl;dr: the California tech community is very short sighted when it comes to their hiring practices.
The judge made one truly epic level bad decision with the Apple Samsung case, is anyone surprised she did the same thing with another case? The whole situation is deplorable and needs a significant legal remedy to prevent it from ever happening again.
but they do tend to side with the property owners, because that's their sorta people. The 'class' if you will.
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ROFL. What a fanboi dilemma.
A computer security company called Accuvant in Colorado has a neat little 'no hire' agreement with over 70 partner companies. Including Symantec, McAfee, Palo Alto and other big names in computer security as well as other consulting companies like Dyntek. Essentially if you work for them you cannot be hired by any of those companies. There is no extra pay to the employee or other compensation for it as well. They use that as a means of limiting what they pay their employees. Of course you don't hear about it until after you've been hired and been brought into the system. At that point you find a lot of the common career progression paths immediately blocked by their agreement.
John Galt is a sociopath.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Next time, vote independent or socialist.
No poach agreements are just another form of price fixing. While companies may be on friendly or less than friendly terms, as long as they are separate companies, they have no right to enter into price fixing agreements. These agreements keep wages below market rates. Someone who might earn $300,000 a year in a free market might only earn $250,000 because other companies won't make competing offers with their current offer.
While losing employees causes a lot of disruption to a company, potential loss of IP, etc. this is just part of the game. All monopolies and cartels can offer plausible sounding reasons why the "order" that they impose on the market is better than competition, but as a society we decided long ago that the free market works better. So it doesn't matter what other benefits these companies claim no-poach agreements have, they are still illegal price fixing.
The only exception I can think of is a prohibition on people who move from company A to company B, contacting their co-workers in company A, in their capacity as an employee of company B. This could be considered in improper use of that person's professional contacts at company A. However a recruiter using public information to contact an employee at another company should always be not only allowed, but encouraged.
Can Everyone just take them to small clams court? All IT workers from the companies in Small clames court = lots of money to be paid out and lot of lawyers if they want to defend all the law sues.
Class action is the ONLY remedy; permit me to illustrate my point.
Judge: So what are the damages you are asking for, sir?
Nerd: I want the difference between what I was making over the years I was employed at A and not B.
Judge: Based on the money B would have offer you, had they actually offered you a job?
Nerd: Yes.
Judge: Based on them wanting to hire you in the first place?
Nerd: Yes.
Judge: anything else I should know?
Nerd: I also want damages for emotional distress.
Judge: For all that time you spent at A instead of B?
Nerd: Yes.
Judge: Due to a practice which you were unaware of until just recently?
Nerd: I have retroactive emotional distress.
Judge: Dismissed. Next!
That is extremely evil, even if Google no longer uses or advertises their original mantra of "Don't Be Evil". Their having had such a mantra as a motto, and not having it now anymore is public renunciation of not being evil which IMHO is equivalent to "Yes, Be Evil!!!" as a positive declaration. So there, I've said it. Google's new motto must be "Yes, Be Evillll!!!" (add a laugh, or cackle, as needed), as it has been proven linguamathacontextually equal. QED. Feynman. Fine Women. Help, I'm drowning in a stream of consciousness...
In addition, one can include temporary, contingent, casual, staffing firm, and any other form of labor that isn't a directly-hired FT employee.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
If recent political events have not impacted any of us enough to change to social perception of "tech workers" as they call us I don't know if anything ever will. If this is the thanks we get for collectively making it possible for our President to charge into a second term using sophisticated analytic techniques encompassing social media, dynamic data storage, and lightning quick responsiveness we should all feel completely bamboozled. All of the hours we spend contributing to the development cycles of these corporations as a whole have completely worked against us. Whether we are coding, testing, debugging, troubleshooting, configuring, installing, designing or just plain providing feedback for the products we use on a day to day basis no matter how it is used every minute of every day all of us are contributing something to advancing the world around us and quite simply making it a better place. I say its time that we deserve some respect for our chosen career path in this sector. Anywhere you go in the United States this line of work has just simply become a stigma. Even on a casual level just mentioning that you work in this field causes the general public to be so utterly turned off and uninterested in anything said after the fact its just plain disrespectful. Are there any movies or television shows that portray us in an exciting or even positive light? Only when it comes to money does it suddenly seem like a worthwhile pursuit. This is the social perception we need to change: that we are all in it only for money and everyone else that gets involved in computing should too. This case reflects that perception I speak of heavily in that it was thrown out because it was money which was the main factor behind it all. Wow, all of us greedy "tech workers" should just go climb under a rock and die right? Especially, when "tech workers" like Bill Gates are out there curing diseases and doing real charitable work still the rest of us are just too low on Mazlow's hierarchy to think outside of outside of our own wallets is the perception. "Tech Workers" are some of the most selfless people in the world and generous as well so we must let it be known. Until they come up with some sort of open-source legal system where anyone can litigate free of charge I think we all know who the real golddiggers are. If things don't change then maybe anyone who wants to create anything on a computer should pay a fee or be forced to attend some sort of educational curriculum and we can all collectively be in control of it and tax them as well. That seems pretty far fetched but its time for us all to band together and make it much more feasible.
The system doesn't have to be like this, we can restructure the game to reward cooperative behavior between the parties using game theory. See my sight for details on a new ADR process that utilizes these insights. We're just getting started, donations and other assistance is appreciated.
http://ibmemployeelegalservices.com/
Nikolas J. Britton
Executive Director
IBM Employee Legal Services, Inc.
nbritto@ibmemployeelegalservices.com
(563) 564-3546
8760A Research Blvd #151
Austin, TX 78758-6420
FORM A REAL PROGRAMMERS UNION.
Then go aorund to every single perosn that programs and ask them to join
note what unions have done in the past for worker rights....wages and benefits.
fact is its time for a users union of rights....why not a programmers one...