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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...
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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.
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.
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!
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.
> 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.