Judge: $324M Settlement In Silicon Valley Tech Worker Case Not Enough

itwbennett writes: "A proposed $324.5 million settlement of claims that Silicon Valley companies (Adobe, Apple, Google, and Intel) suppressed worker wages by agreeing not to hire each others' employees may not be high enough, a judge signaled on Thursday. Judge Lucy Koh didn't say whether she would approve the settlement, but she did say in court that she was worried about whether that amount was fair to the roughly 64,000 technology workers represented in the case. Throughout Thursday's hearing, she questioned not just the amount but the logic behind the settlement as presented by lawyers for both the plaintiffs and the defendants."

Comments

That settlement figure is a scam...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's about $5000 per employee, much less than the costs to the businesses otherwise.

Try $6.5 billion...then they will think twice about this crap.

It can never be fair

[ChrisKnight]

The actions of this cabal of companies has had a lasting effect on everyone working the tech sector. The normal cycle of hiring employees out of their existing position with an offer of more money helps to drive the average salary for a position up. Years of refusing do to that caused average salaries to stagnate. When I was offered a position at Apple in 2007 I scoffed at the rate I was offered, and I was told that Apple prided themselves in paying industry median salaries. What they neglected to mention was that they were actively working to keep the industry median down. I never took the position at Apple, and am not eligible in the suit; but that doesn't mean I wasn't affected. Many companies gauge offer salaries and raises against industry salary reports like those generated by Glass Door and other wage survey groups. Because some of the biggest employers in tech were working to keep wages down, and their rates significantly contributed to those salary reports, they effectively kept an entire employment sector's wages low.

How do you compensate for that? You can't. No court settlement will make up for the damage caused by this.