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.

Comments

And yet

[Spy Handler]

how could these companies say with a straight face that they only want more H1B visa employees due to lack worker shortage and not because they're trying to find cheaper labor?

Re:And yet

[Anonymous Coward]

How horrible! Workers should be completely disposable, just like any common tool or machinery. Only the owners are truly indispensable.

Re:And yet

[vux984]

The solution to H1B visa employees is to simply have combination of a wage requirement plus an annual tariff on H1B visa employees such that the total cost of the H1B visa employee is higher than the median employee costs.

If the companies still want H1B visa employees then there is a genuine shortage, and they'll pay what it takes to get employees.

If suddenly they don't want piles H1B visas and start hiring locally, well.. that tells us there wasn't really a shortage.

Given H1B employees tend to get paid less though, I expect that's the main reason they are desirable.

Re:And yet

[Johnny Mnemonic]

"free market principles," collusion between competitors destroys the free market. The same is true on the other side too, iow unions. I suspect you don't support unions, right? suppressing worker's wages not through lack of demand or value, but by constraining supply through secret conspiracy, is not a free market. It's just the same as the same companies conspiring to raise prices on their goods and refuse to compete with each other, which prevents the Invisible Hand of the market from working correctly.

Re:And yet

[JanneM]

Given the premises of this thread (the costs and salaries of work immigration need to be controlled by the state), here a half-serious suggestion:

Have work immigrants be employed by your federal govermnent, not by the company they work for. The immigrant reports their working hours and conditions to the government, and they get their salary paid out from there. The government dispatches the worker to the company, and get the salary and other costs paid back from them.

The great benefit is that the worker is no longer there at the mercy of the company, and has no incentive to accept bad conditions or missing pay checks from them. And in any labour dispute they have the backing of a major legal and administrative organization. The government gets a clear view of exactly who the work immigrants are and what they do for their employers. The companies are relieved of some of the responsibility for these workers. Everybody has a common, single point of focus where they can turn in case of problems.

Re:And yet

[Dutch Gun]

As a society, we make value judgments all the time about what sort of behaviors should be allowed or prohibited when engaging in commerce. Most of them are based on nothing more than a simple application of the golden rule, or other basic tenants of morality that most societies can agree upon: Don't lie. Don't steal. Don't cheat. Etc, etc.

I wish you luck in trying to argue that, from a moral perspective, two corporations should have the right to secretly negotiate in order to suppress their employee salaries and maximize their profits. Don't lie. Don't cheat. Seems pretty straightforward to me.

WTF? Jailtime! Boycott violates Anti-Trust

[redelm]

Settlement? What settlement? This is a prima facie Clayton Act Anti-Trust violation. Multiple felonies, with jailtime due. Amazingly, this appearently exists on paper, so everyone who negotiated or signed it should go to jail.

The Clayton Act makes organizing supplier boycotts a prohibited activity. And that's just what they have done -- organized a boycott not to hire an employee, times the collective number.

That this has not gone to a Federal Grand Jury appears more like corruption than anything else.

Hang them by balls ..

[MonsterMasher]

Damn right it's too low!
.
Those bastards need to spend time behind f.ing bars, when you consider the pain ans suffering, moving, family brake-ups and suicides this kind of shit ends up doing to people, mostly men.
.
F.ing Tech companies of this size .. just go through top admin, and ALL boards of Directors, and take a vote for each manager, and nail there testicles or pussylips to boards and hall them up in the air ..
.
and let those that suffered, or anyone in the tech industry a bottle of salt water they can use to clean these people's wounds as they hang.. and tell them how it made you feel, to live with too little money .. they will pay attention if you spray when their eye's move away..
.
Thank them one for me!

Not quite accurate

[TiggertheMad]

Unions aren't the same a secret collusion between competitors. A better comparison would be a secret union of all tech workers that required that none of its employees take work with Apple until they raised their entry level salaries for engineers to 500k per year out of desperation. Also, unions are manipulating the invisible hand of the market, but they only exist as a result of the power that currently lies in the hands of capitol. If capitol hadn't collectively acted in a selfish and greedy fashion for the previous thousand years or so, unions would have never been formed. You could say that they are consequence of the invisible hand, but that is sort of a cop out, since any behavior related to the market (up to and including regulation) is a consequence of the market. Gotta love feedback loops.

Re:In other words...

[nolife]

Devolving talent and skills requires time. There is always new people coming in but they do not come in immediately to the higher level positions. They start lower and possibly work their way up. If your top performers are leaving soon after they reach that "top performer" level, you will have less top performers. So, you recognize their benefit to your company and provide better benefits to try to keep keep them happy or you illegally collude with your competition and peers to not offer benefits greater then you or flat out refuse to hire them away from each other at any cost. These companies chose the later method.

many companies exist to hire people

[raymorris]

> It's not about who is dispensable or not, companies do not exist to hire people ...

For many years I worked for a corporation that was set up primarily for the purpose of hiring people and taking care of those employees. For the last 12 months, the company has been losing money by continuing to provide health insurance and such for employees who work fewer than 12 hours per month.

You may think that's incredibly unusual, but actually it's not because many, possibly most, corporations are set up for the purpose of hiring a very small number of people, most notably the owners. There have been many times over the last 20 years when I, as the sole shareholder, have needed to choose between making more money or doing more good for the employees and customers. I decided that money is a means to an end. The PURPOSE if making more money would be in order to better take care of the people I care about. I'd like more money because it would allow me to send my daughter to a better school. I'd like more money because it would allow me to give more to my employees and other friends. I'd like more money because it would allow me to give more to organizations such as United Way and the Crisis Pregnancy Center. Choosing between being good to people or making more money, I choose doing good because after all the whole point of more money would be to do good with it. Choosing more money would be putting the means ahead of the ends.

Re:many companies exist to hire people

[dbIII]

the company has been losing money by continuing to provide health insurance and such for employees who work fewer than 12 hours per month.

Offtopic maybe, but one of the reasons the USA has lost film production jobs to "socialist" places like Canada and Australia is because those health insurance costs to the company do not exist. Instead there's a slight tax markup which is far less you would expect due to not having to waste a lot of cash funnelling it through insurance fat cats before it gets anywhere near the health services.

"hobby" has made a million dollars. Mission statem

[raymorris]

Well you can make up your own definitions of words if you want to, I guess.
My "hobby", as you call it, has brought in over a million dollars. That million has been used according to the company's mission statement.

You know, people actually write down the purpose of the company when they create it. It's called a "mission statement". You might read some sometime. I've yet to see one that says "make money". I have seen a few companies where the people apparently FORGOT their mission, forgot the reason the company was started, and started focusing on money instead. That's why you put the mission statement in prominent places - posted on the wall, on banners, etc - to remind people of why you're there lest they forget.