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Plaintiff In Tech Hiring Suit Asks Judge To Reject Settlement
An anonymous reader writes with news that Michael Devine, one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit accusing tech firms including Apple and Google of conspiring to keep salaries low, has asked the court to reject a $324 million settlement. "Apple has more than $150 billion in the bank, eclipsing the combined cash reserves of Israel and Britain. Google, Intel and Adobe have a total of about $80 billion stored up for a rainy day. Against such tremendous cash hoards, $324 million is chump change. But that is what the four technology companies have agreed to pay to settle a class action brought by their own employees. The suit, which was on track to go to trial in San Jose, Calif., at the end of May, promised weeks if not months of damaging revelations about how Silicon Valley executives conspired to suppress wages and limit competition. Details of the settlement are still under wraps. 'The class wants a chance at real justice,' he wrote. 'We want our day in court.' He noted that the settlement amount was about one-tenth of the estimated $3 billion lost in compensation by the 64,000 class members. In a successful trial, antitrust laws would triple that sum. 'As an analogy,' Mr. Devine wrote, 'if a shoplifter is caught on video stealing a $400 iPad from the Apple Store, would a fair and just resolution be for the shoplifter to pay Apple $40, keep the iPad, and walk away with no record or admission of wrongdoing? Of course not.' 'If the other class members join me in opposition, I believe we will be successful in convincing the court to give us our due process,' Mr. Devine said in an interview on Sunday. He has set up a website, Tech Worker Justice, and is looking for legal representation. Any challenge will take many months. The other three class representatives could not be reached for comment over the weekend."
you dont join class actions. Everyone should know by now that the only people who get rich in class actions are the lawyers. If you believe you have been wronged, bring a suit yourself
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Time for a union that is only way to get the power to the workers!
That never turns out badly.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Mr. Devine said he told his lawyers that he found the settlement inadequate as it was being negotiated, but they ignored him. Lawyers in the case declined to comment on Sunday. ...
As a class representative, he is eligible for an incentive award for the time and effort he put into the case. His lawyers have asked the court to approve a $20,000 payment for each representative from settlements reached last year against three other defendants in the suit — Lucasfilm, Pixar and Intuit. A similar payment might be forthcoming from the settlement with Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe. Even if the case went to trial and the plaintiffs got the full $9 billion, he would not get much more.
RTFA, the reward is about 1/10 of the damage done, insulting and hardly a deterrent.
Cheap storage VM.
Really as much as the libertarian crowd hates unions here, this is the kind of thing they were created to stop- worker exploitation and malfeasance by those who own the means of production.
assuming that attorneys don't eat all the settlement money, this is what, like $6,000 bucks per person in the class?
Your
Time for a union that is only way to get the power to the workers!
Apparently you've never worked for a union. You just pass your power on to the union, whose best interest is the union, not you. I'm not against organized labor, but unions in this country are usually even worse than they corporations they are supposed to protect you against.
I've worked for 3 different union shops in my time and they were all the same. Got seniority? You can't get fired... ever. People would come in drunk and the UAW would protect them. We had teams of people that sat reading books at a picnic table all day just in case someone went home sick, they were making $25/hr to do that. I also worked for AT&T. At one point I had a customer having a problem with a particular database. It was outside my normal functions but they were dead in the water and the department that was supposed to handle it wasn't returning their calls. I fixed it, got commended by management. A month later I had a union grievance filed against me for doing the work someone else should have done. They actually tried to fine me. Luckily I got a new job before they could complete the case and I just told them to stuff it when they decided against me.
This is all anecdotal personal experience so take it with a grain of salt. Maybe I just had bad luck. But I'm done with unions.
(fine as in punishment not as in splendid. But it's fine too)
If you are found guilty (or if you settle, don't think you get off cheaply), you're not fined a fixed sum. You're fined a part (or even multiple) of your annual income. That can be quite substantial in case of corporations. Which is also the reason for the insane fines you hear about when some corporation gets slammed by the EU or a state around here again.
Personally, I consider it a good system. Nobody can simply ignore the law because fines are a pittance to them. A year's income is a year's income, and losing that HURTS. Whether you make 4 or 7 digits (or in case of a corporation, 10+).
The nice side effect is that this also means we have more people paying fines rather than sitting in some prison because they can't. Fines put money in the state treasury. People in jail cost money.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I worked in IT at Ford in a non-union building and got in trouble for moving the overhead bin in my cubicle a level higher on the pegs so my 22 inch CRT (in 2010) Monitor would fit underneath it.
Apparently they have union guys come in to move the desks..... We were told to log a ticket and wait many weeks while not having a monitor on my desk. Just sit there and earn what was at the time $70,000 billed hourly until someone fixes it and gets a working computer setup at the desk.
They were happy to pay me $35/hr to sit and read printed manuals because their own issued computer wouldn't fit inside their own issued desk.
Don't miss that gig :)
This is a case of criminal conspiracy that rippled through the economy. Where billionaires conspired to keep middle class wages lower because they wanted to make even more money for themselves. Not just people in these companies were affected. The illegally restrained salaries at these companies set the bar for millions of people in the industry. They need to pony up a few Billion more at least.
These class action lawsuits themselves seem like blatant ways of companies limiting their own liability... they simply conspire with some lawyers to sue themselves, settle for pennies on the dollar and just a few individuals that proactively reject the settlement can ever get the full amount they are due. And the incentive of those so called lawyers who are getting a percentage commission is to settle for whatever makes them millionaires, not whatever will make people they don't really represent whole.
I think in the future that the courts should require proactive agreement in writing from at least a majority of the class for the settlement to be accepted. And then let anyone that doesn't proactively accept the settlement sue later on. The opt-out system that we have now doesn't result in equitable resolutions.
It's nice to see all the anti-union rhetoric. Now find me a police dept that doesn't have a union. Interesting...
Cheap storage VM.
What DOESN'T have pros and cons? Even vaccinations hurt a bit for a split second, and they're the closest thing to "something that is completely devoid of cons" that I can think of.
With unions, I think history has shown they are good medicine for when the labor force is being abused by employers with government's blessing.
Unfortunately, with both vaccinations and unions, after living with them for too long, people forget what life was like before they were around, and only notice the cons, and then listen to assholes telling them they're nothing but trouble. We then have to do a mini cycle where the old problems come back a little before people realize there are plenty of good reasons for unions or vaccines.
EVERYONE who works in tech has been damaged by this conspiracy. I don't work at Google or Apple, but my compensation is very much influenced by what my employer believes I could reasonably expect to earn if I went to Google.
You seem to forget that Google officially raised their employees salary by 10% after Facebook refused to be part of the illegal agreement. In practice because how the bonus was restructured for some people it was probably an effective increase of up to 25% on the final w2. Considering that most 'tech' at google makes more than $100k per year (staff level engineers make more than $250k per year). multiply that by the number of years this has been going on, and the claimed damage does not seem inflated anymore.
Libertarians are not against unions. Show me one source that shows that libertarians are against the right of people to associate or not associate however they wish. They are against laws that force employers to recognize unions and bargain with them as well as the laws that force employees to become paying union members even if they don't want to.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
The lesson of unions is that you can't put things on autopilot. You have to be involved with the union and make sure it is actually representing your interests. You have to notice and care when the senior members are ripping you off. It happens with unions, small gov, big gov, corporations, sole proprietorship.
Power corrupts, be on guard.
Cheap storage VM.