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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.'"
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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).
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.
The production is done via just in time in ~Asia with long complex cheap supply chains.
The only aspect to "avoiding spiraling costs" would be with very skilled US staff who could move up between brands until wages matched the staff real value.
Smart new firms will find staff anywhere else. Older firms will be left with trapped staff worried about their wages and prospects vs been productive.
Guilds, serfdom and indentured workers have all be tried. If you cant keep staff, perhaps the best staff know next gen growth is difficult with living on gov contracts and advertising via safe expected product lines.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Welcome to Corporatocracy. Which doesn't exist. Because conspiracy theories are always false. And this wage-fixing business is a conspiracy, right?
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.
Jobs is dead :)
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.
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.
Perhaps it was a >:-) smiley?
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8
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.
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.
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.