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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.
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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The point of a class-action lawsuit isn't to earn a gob of cash, it's to facefist the company into changing their behaviour from whatever was it that they were doing to fuck people over. Any cash you get is just a bonus.
The trouble is(that while class actions do generally pay the lawyers too much and the class too little) the alternative to a class action is generally inaction, which pays the class nothing and doesn't even cost the malefactor money.
The 'transaction costs', so to speak, of taking something to court are high. Doubly so(if you are lucky, could be substantially more than doubly) if you are going up against a deep-pocketed foe who really doesn't want adverse precedent or inconvenient discovery to take place. For anything outside of the most trivial cases, this means that your right to individual redress in civil court is mostly theoretical.
What I find most odd about the denial of 'class' status in this case is that an illegal cartel arrangement to push down wages is exactly the sort of situation where it would be very difficult for any specific employee(unless they are allowed to take their case to discovery and dig up a bunch of juicy internal documents mentioning them by name) to prove any specific salary delta between the competitive and noncompetitive situations; but it should be relatively simple(by economic modeling standards) to arrive at an approximate figure for overall savings on wages by the cartel members. And, while precisely allocating the unpaid hypothetical wages to the people who lost them would be gravy, just getting to the point where the malefactors are punished would at least have deterrent value, and hopefully make such agreements less common elsewhere and in the future.
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?
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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.
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!
Stupid winger bullshit. The people in the class action suit take zero risk, which means if the suit is successful they literally get money for nothing. Whereas if the case is lost, the lawyers are on the hook for the entire cost of the case - which can be enormous if there are a few hundred thousand documents to parse and dozens of staffers to pay salaries for.
Don't like it, take your own damn risk and hire your own damn lawyer.
But of course no one is going to do that if the amount they've been stiffed is less than the cost of even filing in small claims court. The only solutions are class action lawsuits, or government agencies cracking the whip. But of course, the sort of useful idiots (for the corporations) that hate class action lawsuits also hate government oversight.