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Apple, Google Go On Trial For Wage Fixing On May 27
theodp writes: "PandoDaily's Mark Ames reports that U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh has denied the final attempt by Apple, Google, Intel, and Adobe to have the class action lawsuit over hiring collusion practices tossed. The wage fixing trial is slated to begin on May 27. 'It's clearly in the defendants' interests to have this case shut down before more damaging revelations come out,' writes Ames. (Pixar, Intuit and LucasFilm have already settled.) The wage fixing cartel, which allegedly involved dozens of companies and affected one million employees, also reportedly affected innovation. 'One the most interesting misconceptions I've heard about the "Techtopus" conspiracy,' writes Ames of Google's agreement to cancel plans for an engineering center in Paris after Jobs expressed disapproval, 'is that, while these secret deals to fix recruiting were bad (and illegal), they were also needed to protect innovation by keeping teams together while avoiding spiraling costs.' Ames adds, 'In a field as critical and competitive as smartphones, Google's R&D strategy was being dictated, not by the company's board, or by its shareholders, but by a desire not to anger the CEO of a rival company.'"
Apple, Google, Intel, and Adobe agree Soulskill must be fired
Don't be evil!
But is it really worth the virtually inevitable lawsuit for a company as successful as the defendants in this case to cheat the backbone of their operations out of a fair wage (because a fare wage is what the Carnies make) betting on the statistically improbable scenario that no law firm nowhere will pick the cause up for three quarters of the pie?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe, working together at last!
Oh wait...
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
After Google CEO Eric Schmidt informed Steve Jobs that a Google recruiter had been terminated for not-getting-with-the-do-not-poach-program, Jobs responded by e-mailing only an evil 'smiley' to Apple's head of HR.
Hasn't been any proof of any wrong doing so far. Anti-poach agreements aren't illegal or even unethical. Agreeing not to break the law by going after other companies employees is not a problem. If there was a no hire agreement it would be an issue but we've seen no evidence of that.
Actually, anti-poaching agreements ARE illegal in certain states. In particular, California, where many of these firms are based have specific laws that are supposed to avoid collusion like being alleged here.
Seriously "avoiding spiraling costs" sounds like the justification for using slaves in 1860 Alabama. If Apple, Goggle, etal end up losing and paying substantial fines the reason might very well be lack of competent legal advice when these arrangements were implemented. Perhaps the companies tried to reduce spiraling legal costs as well.
As an "Apple Fanboi" I hope if Apple did something illegal they get slammed for it.
Apple has been more open than anyone else about their overseas workplace wages/working conditions that if they have been abusing their Local ones they deserve what they get. This won't however stop me from buying their products :-)
Fucking Apple
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
This is just the tip of the iceberg in Silicon Valley wage fixing, discriminatory hiring, and age/gender discrimination. I would like to see the tech workers walk away with some big bags of cash since most of these companies are paying federal/state taxes in the USA. At least when the employees get paid it will benefit their local countries, states, and communities by re-patrioting some cash through taxation.
To me this is just further proof that large companies can do whatever they want, ignore any laws they want, not pay taxes/wages, and ignore the "invisible hand of the market" any time they wish. The lawsuit will probably be dismissed on Tuesday when the court opens, I am sure someone is writing the check as you read this.
Of course they have to "work together" to fix wages.
If one decided to start paying their employees twice as much as the other, the other would lose all their employees to them. There need to be limits to that kind of thing, otherwise they will start fighting over wages, always increasing them to retain their employees until the day they can no longer compete and just decide to close up shop in the US and go for the cheaper Chinese labor.
Necessary to keep teams together? I don't think so. How about, maybe, paying well enough that people people aren't tempted to jump ship in the middle of a project? Or putting people under contract instead of having them be at-will employees? Sure you can't just fire them any time you want (unless you've got good cause, like failure to do their jobs), but you don't have to worry about losing them at any time either.
These hiring collusions aren't necessary to keep employees. They're only necessary to keep employees without the company doing anything to actually keep employees.
It all depends on how much lawyer you can afford. This agreement is "likely illegal" and definitely shady. I would say this classifies as a cartel since 7 major tech companies are involved. An anti-poach agreement might be legal between two companies like Ford and GM, but not an seven. There are also possible federal anti-trust, anti-competition, anti-labor, and collusion charges which could be brought as well, but that won't happen since none of these companies did anything nearly as (sic) horrible as Aaron Swartz.
Except that, as these companies make abundantly clear when you're hired, you are not in an employment contract. You are an at-will employee who can leave at any time and who can be terminated at any time for any or no reason. Companies like that because it lets them just fire people whenever they want, and these agreements are simply to let the company have all the advantages of having at-will employees without having to suffer any of the consequences of having at-will employees.
Notice how the headlines only mention Google and Apple, while deferring some of the other conspirators to the text?
Bias much assholes?
Anti poaching agreements ARE illegal in many places, including where this is being prosecuted. I can't see how you can see nothing ethically wrong with your employer going out and actively limiting your work opportunities and supressing your wages.
while these secret deals to fix recruiting were bad (and illegal), they were also needed to protect innovation by keeping teams together while avoiding spiraling costs
Yes, needing to offer competitive wages to creative team members would have increased the cost of the individual project, but that need not affect the company's bottom line if it finds cost savings elsewhere, like in executive compensation.
'is that, while these secret deals to fix recruiting were bad (and illegal), they were also needed to protect innovation by keeping teams together while avoiding spiraling costs.'
If you want to protect innovation, pay your programmers enough. If your product can't cover costs of paying a competitive salary, it doesn't deserve to be a product. Welcome to capitalism.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
we're not leaving until it's really even they say http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=moms+against+wmd+on+credit&sm=3 new clear options piling up
You can also have employees sign non-compete agreements which limits their right to work for a competitor for X years. However, in California (where the movie industry lives) these agreements are NOT LEGAL. Because of this, the tech giants had to find another way to limit employee mobility and this was it.
So, let's see: Jobs is behaving like an a**hole, taking revenge on people leaving Apple and preventing them from getting new jobs. To do so, he threatens a smaller startup, which is what Google was at the time. Seems to me the culprit here is Jobs and Apple, and the victims are both his employees and Google.
May I say that we all miss Groklaw's insightful analysis, and very open access to, the core documents and analyses of these cases? If anyone on Slashdot knows PJ personally and can encourage her to accept the problem of email monitoring and return to her legal soapbox, she'd be welcomed. Groklaw's analyses of these cases, and PJ's careful attention to detail were welcome and instructive.
Perfect. They'll just move all the development to Bangalore. Problem solved !
They are 'at will' employees. The VPs and senior managers are likely under detail contracts but the people doing the actual work will be regular employees. Well paid but still employees that can be released at any moment (in most states.)
> These aren't tech support jobs they're design and engineering teams
That certainly does not mean they are employees, and not contractors. I've often helped train such contractors, and helped them get their development concerns verified by an outside agency so that they're taken more seriously and actually addressed rather than lost in the "not invented here" distaste from headquarters based teams in their own company.
Perhaps the state in which you live permits indentured servitude, but California law restricts what employment terms can be enforced and leaving to join a competitor is an act that is protected under California law.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Many places any such work contract that prevents you from seeking work elsewhere or talking to competitors for better jobs is also illegal. You seem to be living in some dream world where only laws that benefit the company are valid and everything else can be safely ignored.
How many similar deals exist in other industries where CEO's are smart enough to leave it as unwritten gentlemans agreements and there is no evidence like this to dig up?
Also, this might be the reason that many companies have now started to have policies of deleting all email older than a year, because they are scared that their email archives are more damaging to themselves in court than they are valuable for proving things against others.
I thought unions were the good guys?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
But that, like most facts, doesn't matter to republicans. Since they control the judicial branch now expect them to put these engineers in prison for a very long time. The hate engineers, and even Palin called them "modern day niggers" so expect us to get fucked. They hate technology and us.
Fucking Slapper
While I lean towards the left, don't assume collusion isn't just as likely to happen among 'supposed' Democrats as it is among Republicans.
The real problem we have here is companies becoming bigger than god himself (in ego at least). And our inability as individuals or 'collective controllers of the government' to really rake the coals over their feet for acting as such.
Bringing ethics into it clouds the issue. Its not something we want in society, I think, so its probably easiest to leave it at that.
These same companies went to Congress many, many times to get more H1B visas when even technical call center wages were being pressured up to median income levels. It was fine to intervene in market forces when politicians were getting checks, but not if they were left out of the "negotiations".
vi? Who's that?
That douchebag should go back to Moscow and kill himself with his cocaine habit.
Republicans control the judicial branch?
You need to get your meds adjusted, son.
I assume this will reach class action status and settle, with a payout fifteen years from now of $15 (after lawyer's fees) per software engineer who worked in the Silicon Valley area during that time period.
Really? :) now equals "evil smiley"?
Since when did :) mean _EVIL_ smiley? When did this change happen? Last I heard it just mean "smile" and I've been on the internet a LONG time so you'd think I'd have heard that it had changed.
Oh. Wait. I see. You're trying to make Jobs sound more malicious by adding that little descriptor (while omitting any such ominous descriptors for Schmidt nor any Google people).
Biased much? :)
No one at being recruited is at will. These aren't tech support jobs they're design and engineering teams. These folks have very detailed contracts. Your not working a new products without one.
You're quite wrong. Having worked on secret projects at both Apple and Google, the only thing you get to sign extra above and beyond your original employment agreement, which is primarily a non-disclosure agreement, is layered non-disclosure agreements.
It's actually quite funny, since they bring you an agreement with a project codename on it that you aren't allowed to discuss under your original agreement, and then after that NDA, you are now allowed to learn the codeword for the project you're going to be working on, and you sign an NDA for that project, too.
Very, very rarely you will be asked to sign a vendor or partner NDA, but if you're asked to do that, you are generally compensated for the signing, because it means not working in that area for another company for a couple of years, and the compensation is to pay you for foregoing the opportunity.
FYI, everyone below management director level, including line managers, are "at will", at least in Apple and Google in California, and it's likely the case elsewhere, since some of the work is considered by the Franchise Tax Board to take place in California, if you are managed from California, so California gets to collect income tax on it. The two "Distinguished Engineers" I know at Apple I've discussed it with are also "at will", rather than contract employees.
I'm not sure about the people at director level or above at Apple, or above directory level at Google, since, frankly, the topic has never come up in casual conversation, and generally people tend not to talk about their compensation anyway, unless you are a very close friend or family member.
Generally, both companies rely on options maturation (or RSU - Google calls them GSUs and ties them to performance) vesting schedules to act as "golden handcuffs", rather than contracts. You're generally not a high level contract employee without a parachute (silver or golden).
In case you are wondering, non-competes are also not legal in California, unless the competition occurs as side work during your employment at the company, and generally are not considered legally enforceable in the U.S., unless they continue to pay your salary (plus scaled increases based on past increases, if any were performance related) during the lockout period. You can thank my cousin for this, as he took his non-compete to the supreme court (and yes, they payed him to take the year off at his regular salary to prevent him from going to a competitor).
In case you have not noticed, all of these companies are all heavily democratic. They are all in the heart of "Silicon Valley" which is only a few minutes from San Francisco...all of that area is very liberal and of the democratic party. Just look at what the Facebook founders are talking about every day (not having to do with Facebook). You, sir, are totally confused.
Actually, I think the smiley in that instance could be called evil because it referred to the firing of an employee of another company that he made happen. So, if I sent a knife to someone along with a letter telling them to stab you, and they then did it, then my package could be considered an evil package.
And it affected nearly 1 Million people.
A lot of these agreements were not just about engineers. And many of the people involved also probably made "middle class" salaries in NYC and SF or other high cost-of-living. But it's all just speculation (except you fell into the trap of trying to label it as something about "opportunity", and that these companies pay "well"). Ultimately what it comes down to though is that these companies were conspiring to deprive employees of better pay, better opportunity and they were exerting a downward pressure on wages as a result. If your employees are getting calls from a rival, you're supposed to pay them enough not to leave. This isnt about a bored employee looking for a new project, this is about avoiding having to pay the "in-demand" (real market) rate for employees.
Oh, and just in case you though this was just Google and Apple, here's the list of companies involved:
http://pando.com/2014/02/19/court-documents-reveal-steve-jobs-blistering-threat-to-ceo-who-wouldnt-join-wage-fixing-cartel/
If they lose this case, I expect to hear that Apple is cancelling their big project and moving their HQ to another "business friendly state".
Google is already planning on building a slave ship for indentured servants to work outside US borders.
Intel will just complete their move to Texas, which we all know has no problem pulling their citizen's pants down and pushing them over for a business.
As an ACTUAL conservative (not the phony Wathington DC sort) I have a healthy fear of ANY large organization (too much power concentrated in the hands of too few of those pesky fallible, corruptible human beings). I fear (in the sence of being wary of) big government, and I fear big business, and I notice that they both tend to like each other a lot and they both tend to dislike the individual (and fear/hate the individual who does not go along with their programs).
These companies were not just helping themselves and eachother to keep costs down by eliminating bidding wars over a few talented employees (that would be bad enough, but they'd prefer we looked no deeper into the matter). The truth is that their actions suppressed the wages of ALL tech workers in the US (and almost certainly beyond the US, but I'll leave that to others). Most companies decide what to offer based on the "prevailing wage" in their industry for a given position, and when the titans of an industry all collude to push those wages down, they push down the so-called prevailing wage. Bubba's software firm does not feel pressure to offer a programmer more than Apple Adobe and Google offer for a programmer with similar duties and qualifications. This extends to benefits as well since they contribute to an overall compensation package. I personally detest class action suits as scams-for-the-legal-profession (there's nothing like a lawsuit that makes the lawyers rich while getting $1.50 coupons for each of a million plantiffs) BUT if they are a valid legal theory then this ought to get one, with every programmer and electrical engineed in the country as a plaintiff.
There is also, of course, a MAJOR hypocrisy here: All the companies here support left-leaning politicians and policies (admittedly this may be more about PR and establishing a "we are good guys" image than core ideology) which are often tied to arguments about raising the minimum wage, arguments about a "living wage", and arguments about "income inequality". This is all so very laughable, because these companies were all working hard to keep wages down. Oh, and they don't get to claim that the two issues are unrelated; if you push the minimum wage up over and over again, then over time it approaches the low-end of the non-minimum-wage workers (who, in turn, start to fuss about barely making more than minimum wage). If a company compensates by pushing-up the wages of these slightly-above-minimum-wage workers, then the next layer up of employees starts to complain, and so-on. Not only is it inflationary, but it also ultimately converges on the wages the big businesses were directly suppressing - eventually SOMETHING has to give. On the subject of "income inequality": this was arguably a play to keep the upper-middle-class from being able to close any of the gap between them and the uber-rich investor-class (which CEOs and corporate board members are generally a part of). Let's face it, a company with the annual revenues of Google or Apple could absolutely afford to boost the pay of dozens of top employees (of the sort that were so valuable these firms were poaching them from each-other, which is what they colluded to end) in a bidding war without any fiscal impact that exceeded the level of statistical noise (it's not like they were worried they would be bidding to boost the pay of tens of thousands of employees) so this was not REALLY just about a few thousand dollars but more about authority, power, and control.
Hence why companies need more H1Bs, where such concerns don't apply for some reason.
I prefer my goat roasted
Necessary to keep teams together? I don't think so. How about, maybe, paying well enough that people people aren't tempted to jump ship in the middle of a project? Or putting people under contract instead of having them be at-will employees? http://thietkewebsitebanhang.d...
Oh boy are you wrong. Sure the manpower costs in India are small but that is not the whole story. Finding even half competent developers in places such a Bangalore/Chennai/Mumbai is a real problem.
Indians have this annoying habit of putting on the CV/Resume technologies/products that they simply have no skill in. They are ther because someone used them on a project they worked on. I interviewed more than 200 people for 10 developer positions in Bangalore. We got TWO. The rest were next to useless.
The deferential society in India does not help. If you think that an Indian dev will say 'sorry boss I can't do x,y & z because or a,b &c' then think again.
Then there is the quality of the work. Some of it from supposedly experienced people is hardly above beginner level.
Yes I am generalising but you have to change your whole way of working when dealing with people in India on the ground. I can end up costing you more than doing it in the US/Europe.
Don't even get me started on the totally absurd beaureaucy that reigns supreme in India. Just getting a local SIM card for your phone is a real ordeal. Nothing happens quickly there.
It is not the 'developer heaven' is is cracked up to be.
I call BS, I work on new products and I can leave any time.
Anybody who thinks this kind of collusion is innocent is (IMO) crazy. Ask your managers if they will work for less money?
Seriously, are you the same people who believe your career is over at 35 years old? Then you better make bank now. And if you don't believe it, then make bank anyway.
So, a couple of weeks ago I was an evil supposedly-one-percenter who was oppressing the poor people of San Francisco by commuting from my little apartment by bus. By bus! The epitome of evil! This week, I'm a poor wage slave whose salary is being kept down by collusion among his evil corporate bosses. I wish people's faux outrage over somebody else's issues would at least be consistent.
Jobs is dead :)
Faux Knews continuously uses the word nigger. You are right about how racist start-ups are in silicon valley. They refuse to hire any employees that are not white. Faux Knews, while full of shit 99% of the time, is correct about this racist. Those companies are Republican from door to door. They hate minorities and want them to die.
Only Steve Jobs can send evil smileys ;)
Though if you know him and his email style, you know he never sends smileys except out of glee.
Unethical is being under contract with a company and colluding with another one to violate it. If a NFL team talks to a contracted player without getting the other teams permission they are acting illegally.
Your implication that legality means ethical and illegality means unethical is dubious at best and dangerous and criminal at worst. I'm not sure why the NFL is our guideline for morals. Do we get their pay too?
Ethical or not partially depends what the contract says and the conditions when signing it. All contracts are not equal in value. Not all contracts are enforceable.
In an imaginary world where employees and employers had equal leverage and sat down and wrote their contracts from a to z together, with equal access to impartial and equally-paid lawyers on both sides, and the employee was not forced to accept a situation almost entirely to their disadvantage in order to have food on the table, shelter, and access to medical care, you might have a point.
In the U.S. ? Laughable. You are a fool and only get fscked over for having principles. The employers do not follow them. If anything, they will say you are too difficult to work with and just not hire you.
They will also do any and anything against the law or not, unless you take them to court. They know that most their employees/victims will just take being pushed around because they do not have as big as pockets as the employer does.
Good luck paying your mortgage and raising a family.
I agree with you in theory, and two wrongs do not make a right, but reality is much different.
If anything, this story shows what happens when you trust managers and recruiters. You get screwed over for years, and only by chance MAYBE the truth gets uncovered, long after the damage has been done.
I love the Intel line referenced FTFA: "we don't believe we broke any laws"
translation: we will do anything and everything, moral or not, as long as we find a legal way to behave unethically.
2 year olds.
> while these secret deals to fix recruiting were bad (and illegal), they were also
> needed to protect innovation by keeping teams together while avoiding
> spiraling costs.
That is bullshit. If an Apple employee has a job offer from Google for $20,000 more, then give the Apple employee a $25,000 raise if you need to keep the team together. Apple has $160 billion or something like that in the bank. They are giving dividends to shareholders whose stock holdings have gone up exponentially over the course of just a few years.
Wages have been flat for 30 years while productivity and corporate profits soared. There's no excuse at all for not paying employees.
Companies do this all the time, Apple, Intel, and Adobe are just a few who have been the chosen one's for examples. I am sure Apple is more afraid of the bad press and what that will result in, then any penalty for wage fixing. I know it came out recently how Steve Jobs was upset with former employee's gong to work for Google even though they were not retained at Apple. Who really benefits from this kind of litigation? Lawyers.
Context does make a difference. Most people have things like empathy which makes ":)" sent as a response when informed you just got someone fired for doing their job _pretty_fu**ing_evil_. That this is in the context of illegal dealings makes it even more so.
You are a stupid asshole who likes to stand up for a dead asshole :)
^ Evil smiley.
of-course, if the law conflicts with your religious beliefs, then it is automatically unjust!
What's your wang have to do with anything?
They "had to"???
"'is that, while these secret deals to fix recruiting were bad (and illegal), they were also needed to protect innovation by keeping teams together while avoiding spiraling costs.' Ames adds, 'In a field as critical and competitive as smartphones, Google's R&D strategy was being dictated, not by the company's board, or by its shareholders, but by a desire not to anger the CEO of a rival company.'""
Am I missing something here? Teh secret deal was to protect "innovation" (and prevent free market wage increases) BUT they couldn't innovate anyways? Wut?
I guess that they missed the point that this along with h-1bs is to keep tech salaries as low as possible, and from what I can tell preferably dropping.
Perhaps it was a >:-) smiley?
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8
Nice. What a bunch of fucking cunts.
Here's my response to the "Jobs is dead" headline... :)
Not by itself, you also need to look at the From: header.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
finally these motherfuckers will pay the people who MADE THEM
Really? :) now equals "evil smiley"?
Well what is an "evil" smile? It's a smile in an evil context.
You are right about how racist start-ups are in silicon valley. They refuse to hire any employees that are not white
What??? Clearly you've never set foot inside a single silicon valley start-up.
Really? An entire tirade over the meaning of a smily? Welcome to Slashdot.
Perhaps the smiley was in reference to Eric Schmidt saying he had dealt with the issue and Schmidt's assurance it won't happen again, rather than because the recruiter got fired. You can read the email in question yourself, but this was my interpretation after reading it. The recruiter in question wasn't following Google policy (i.e. not doing their job how they were told to), should Jobs really care someone got fired for not doing their job properly? That isn't to say that this "no poaching" agreement isn't evil, I think it is.
The person was fired not for doing their job, but not doing it as Google's policy dictated they should, and the fact of the person being fired wasn't the sole content of the email.
Round and round we go. Agreeing to not actively poach from each other does *NOT* limit anyone's opportunities or wages. Workers were / are still free to apply for any job they damn well please.