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Judge Rejects $324.5 Million Settlement For Tech Workers, Argues For More
An anonymous reader writes with this news from Reuters: A U.S. district judge on Friday ruled that the $324.5 million settlement negotiated by Apple, Google, Intel, and Adobe with the tech workers who brought an antitrust lawsuit against them was too low. The judge cited the settlement amount of a similar lawsuit brought against Disney and Intuit last year which resulted in plaintiffs obtaining proportionally more for lost wages. And yet, according to the judge, the current plaintiffs have "much more leverage". She cited evidence clearly showing Apple's Steve Jobs strong-arming the other companies in the suit into agreeing to a no-employee-poaching agreement, and in one instance, of Google failing to rope in Facebook into a similar agreement which resulted in a 10% increase of all Google employee salaries. In other words, clear evidence that the no-poaching agreement effectively suppressed the salaries of these companies' tech workers. Another hearing is scheduled for September 10.
Because it turns out, workers are actually people, and people have value that they want respected. Which is why we have governments, in order to serve the people.
- so start your own company and give all the respect to anybody you want. No, what you are after is worse than any 'Ferenge' or whatever, you want oppression of individual freedoms by government, that is not authorised at all actually to regulate businesses.
Newsflash, something you may learn here: "regulating interstate commerce" does not provide a blanket permission to regulate business, it means preventing States from setting up monopolies, forbidding people from out of State to do business there. Regulating interstate commerce meant to UPHOLD the free market principles, not destroy them.
There should be no government regulations, the reason government usurped all this unauthorised power is laziness and jealousy of people who would rather see government steal from others to subsidise themselves than try and compete in the actual free market environment, providing fellow citizens with products and services they would be willing to trade for voluntarily.
Achieving business profits in free market capitalism is the most moral way to run an economy, since profits in a free market economy only come from voluntary exchange and participation rather than coercion that fascists and socialists (basically thieves and oppressors) want.
You can't handle the truth.
You have tried to equate rising wages to labor cost to anti-business.
You're the only one doing the equating. Let's look at what roman_mir actually wrote:
and that's a problem of business costs being too high thanks to government rules, taxes, regulations, litigation costs, inflation etc.
Notice the complete absence of any mention of wages anywhere in the original post.
Let's nevermind the horrendous losses Amazon suffered around the millenium, it was only a hobby.
So Amazon has no intent to ever make a profit? Losing money now to make more money later is not an alien concept.