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Silicon Valley Workers May Pursue Salary-Fixing Lawsuit

Posted by Unknown on from the next-thing-they'll-be-letting-them-unionize dept.

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."

3 of 130 comments (clear)

  1. Re:IANAL, but... by dkleinsc · · Score: 5, Insightful

    They have a demonstrably anti-competitive agreement between purchasers of a service to make each seller only able to deal with one of the purchasers, creating a monopsony. Textbook macro basically argues that the effect of a monopsony is that the only buyer in the market now has basically complete control of the terms of any agreement with the seller, because the seller's only option is to not sell his product.

    Another way of describing this: Imagine you work for Amazon. Without these agreements, you have these options:
    1. Accept a 3% raise to continue working at Amazon.
    2. Accept a 25% raise to go work for Google.
    3. Not work at all and be unemployed or at least accept a massive wage cut.

    With these agreements your options now are:
    1. Accept a 3% raise to continue working at Amazon.
    2. Not work at all and be unemployed or at least accept a massive wage cut.

    This is inherent in these kind of agreements. There's no need to prove intent.

    --
    I am officially gone from /. Long live http://www.soylentnews.com/
  2. but it didn't remove the option. by YesIAmAScript · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  3. I worked for HP about 15 years ago. by mark_reh · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...