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Silicon Valley Workers May Pursue Salary-Fixing Lawsuit
First time accepted submitter amartha writes with news that a lawsuit alleging Silicon Valley companies of colluding to lower wages is going forward as a class action. From the article: "Roughly 60,000 Silicon Valley workers won clearance to pursue a lawsuit accusing Apple Inc, Google Inc, and others of conspiring to drive down pay by not poaching each other's staff, after a federal appeals court refused to let the defendants appeal a class certification order."
I'm shocked. You mean large tech companies conspired to fuck over their employees?
Say it isn't so!!
It might be difficult to prove the INTENT of the "no poaching" agreement was to suppress wages. Unless any of the defendants were stoopid enough to refer to such in emails or other discoverable documentation.
I'm curious what evidence they have that shows this
I'm sure the people protesting in SF will be glad to hear that the Googlers are, in fact, underpaid.
...Or do they simply have circumstantial evidence? For, if the companies got into a pact via a "gentleman's agreement" - an agreement not written down on paper and not recorded in speech anywhere, potential employees will have a tough time proving their case.
Disclaimer: I support Google, Apple and their ilk.
Bravo. The first time that I have seen an accurate description of the free-market.
Awesome.
Not. Looks like things haven't changed in generations.
My grandpa moved from the east coast to the west coast back in the 50s because of non-poaching agreements in the aircraft industry.
The agreement was not to reach out and poach others' workers. It wasn't to refuse to hire them. You still had the option of getting a 25% raise to go to Google, all you have to do is apply to Google.
The agreement didn't reduce the options available to people, it just made it so the engineer had to take the first step, the recruiter wouldn't call you to entice you.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I know Google is fond of buying up companies but I was not aware they had bought ALL of them.
Because otherwise your whole argument falls to pieces when you realize that someone can leave Amazon/Google/Apple and work at ANY OTHER COMPANY. Often with VC funding paying huge salaries. So in what way does a gentleman's agreement not to poach drive down wages?
Furthermore, the agreement was not to SEEK OUT employees of those other companies - they can always move between companies of their own volition. So in your own example, someone working at Amazon would have all of the first three options even with the agreements in place.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Years ago when I was doing jobbie work I found out that the job shops in the Detroit Metro area had a similar agreement not to hire people working for other job shops. It was a kind of a "Don't piss in your neighbors backyard" thing. Turns out a lot more companies are doing this in a lot more places than you might guess. Can anyone say "slave labor?". This kind of thing starts out in the board rooms and propagates down to the hiring floor, not the other way around. This is a very revealing insight into how these "people above suspicion" on the corporate boards think. Is it time to take down one or more of these "Too Big To Prosecute" firms? Can we actually dare to believe one of these people might serve some time in prison? Nah! Not as long as their cronies in government protect them.
Every year the HR people would make presentations to us about how they got together with HR people from other big engineering companies in the valley and decided upon job descriptions and pay and benefits packages, and by the way decided that the COL raise this year would be X%.
My coworkers, most of whom were oblivious to the big picture, would cheer at the annual pay raise and I would grumble about the salary fixing that they were proudly presenting.
I wonder if I can get in on the class-action suit...
If it complies with the law then how's it a scam? Also, if you don't think the law is correct then the bone you have to pick is with the government - not the employers.
If you live in a country without truth-in-advertising laws (or with poorly enforced ones), you can advertise blatantly untrue claims, comply with the law, and it's still a scam.
Kind of like how the holocaust can still be murder/genocide even if Hitler makes it legal.
Wait, so now the law is that colluding to reduce workers' wages is only illegal if there's no possible way around the collusion?
That's new information. Thanks.
I got headhunter calls for jobs at Google when I was at Apple, I have friends who went from Apple to Google, Google to Yahoo, Apple to Pixar, etc.
Silicon Valley sure sounds a lot like Wall St nowadays, and reminds me of a certain movie:
"Whatever, same thing, I made almost a
quarter of a million dollars last year...
for what... pushing some numbers around
on a computer screen, so a bunch of
glorified crack addicts could take that
information and pretend to understand it,
and then make a bet against some other
jock half way around the world who if he
wasn't doing this would probably be in
some OTB somewhere putting it all on
number seven. And at the end of the day
one guy loses and the other guy wins.