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Silicon Valley Fights Order To Pay Bigger Settlement In Tech Talent Hiring Case
The Washington Post carries a story from the Associated Press that says the big companies hit hardest by Judge Lucy Koh's ruling in the "No Poaching" case have not suprisingly appealed that ruling, which found that a proposed settlement of $324.5 million to a class-action lawsuit was too low. The suit, filed on behalf of 60,000 high-tech workers allegedlly harmed by anti-competitive hiring practices, will probably enter its next phase next January or March. (Judge Koh is probably
not very popular at Apple in particular.) If you're one of those workers (or in an analogous situation), what kind of compensation or punitive action do you think is fair?
How about the amount of money they didn't have to pay their employees times 2 or 3?
Fair? Cancel all of their H1B visas.
Are there any laws we shouldn't gut in order to be 'competitive'?
If there were 60,000 impacted workers and the no-poaching agreement lowered the average salary for them by $10,000 each/year than that would translate into $600,000,000/year that the agreement was in place. If we tap it out at 10 years that would be 6 Billion dollars in actual damages. Let's add on punitive damages as well because if the only costs associated with breaking the law is that if you get caught you have to pay what you would have paid in the first place there is no motivation to not illegally screw your workers. So we double that and have a possible jury verdict of 12 Billion Dollars
However to be fair too the companies in question this is a settlement where to avoid the pain of lawyers and dragging it out they pay upfront. So let's reduce the total payout to 25% of what their potential liability would be. I think 3 Billion Dollars or 10X what they are currently offering might be a reasonable starting point for discussions
This is government meddling with people's private property (businesses) nothing else.
Yes, sometimes I wish the government would cease its meddling, like all the laws that allow corporations to become "legal entities" and shield the owners of these corporations from financial losses. The concept of limited liability is evil government meddling.
The problem we have in the US is that firms are given a great deal of leeway to insure that they can charge as high as price as the market will bear, but labor is severely restricted in doing the same. For instance firms are free to form collectives that lobby congress and produce promotional campaigns, even to the point of forcing companies to pay for such promotions, but unions have to bill lobbying efforts separate and members can opt out. Likewise firms are allowed to use some pretty significant tools to prevent labor from organizing, though firms are free to do the same with few restrictions.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Which is fine. The alternative would be for the citizens to lynch the managers who perpetrated this and take their money by force.
I have yet to meet a unionized engineer.
When I worked for Bloomberg in New York City, they were constantly firing international employees for theft of intellectual property. Not sure where that charge came from.
Sounds to me that your whole point is that some VC told you how to think. H-1B visa holders are only popular with people like CEOs and VC who really have no experience in the field. Working engineers know that they are wildly overrated. That's why so many companies have abandoned the use of H-1B visa holders. It is a practice valued by people who really don't have any experience in the field. They think it's a good value but in fact it's a myth. Tata produces terrible engineers. They pretend they're going to send experienced engineers here but the people that companies actually get are unexperienced and come here expecting to be trained by US engineers. Then, they produce terrible work and US engineers have to silently rewrite it. I say "silently" because management doesn't want to hear that fact because they want to push the fiction that they're saving money. So, then, the cycle continues where management believes it's saving money while domestic engineers have to actually rewrite the crappy code produced by Tata. I have seen this play out in several companies, especially ones located in NYC.
Oh, I do know for a fact, much better than everybody here, that the Supreme Court's opinions do not in fact change Constitutionality of legislation. They pass opinions however their opinions do not change the illegality of laws and do not make them legal.
Also a law doesn't need to be heard by the SCOTUS to be understood as an unconstitutional one. An unconstitutional law is unconstitutional before SCOTUS hears and and after, regardless of what SCOTUS finds.
MY OTHER COMMENTS
what kind of compensation or punitive action do you think is fair?
Jail.
Continuing the analogy given by the plaintiff, if you steal a $400 iPad, you're going to jail. So, send the fuckers to jail. There are emails, from individuals. Those individuals committed crimes. Put them in jail.
Rich people & corporations have money, lots of it. And they can always get more. ANY financial penalty is "only money".
We all have a limited amount of time on this planet. 10 years in prison should convince other CEOs to not be dumb again.
"they don't hire H1-Bs to suppress wages"
YES THEY DO! You need to wake up and smell the coffee... they're just being more sophisticated and diabolical than you are.
Here's how it works: First, they often dishonestly hire the H1-B's (frequently by tailoring "job requirements" in ways that only the people they want fit the "requirements" even when these phoney requirements have no relationship to the job; the first goal is to have a number of immigrants on visas in the workforce - the precise number and the positions held are not critical. The critical thing is that they get a bunch of workers who they have extra leverage over due to the visa, and the second goal is to sprinkle them into the workforce so that all of their American workers know somebody among them who is there on a visa. These workers are less likely to ask for raises and increased benefits, both because what they are getting already seems generous compared to what they'd get back home, and also for fear that they could be sent home and replaced by another visa holder. This sends an unspoken "message" to all the American workers: YOU can easily be replaced by a foreign worker who is more compliant and not likely to ask for more pay and benefits. The extra message is "we, the management, are comfortable with foreign workers and with entrusting all the details of our products to them" (which adds-in the implcit threat that Americans need to not get too demanding or the whole place cound be outsourced to India or some such place). With the large tech employers holding salaries flat through this scam, they effectively manipulate the "industry standard" wages for every tech worker in the US in these fields (which, in circular fasion, then helps them pretend that they are paying their workforce "industry standard" wages. Had they NOT used those H1-Bs, the Americans would have demanded and recieved higher wages and the money they are paying the H1-B holders would indeed be sub-standard; these wages are not being used for a first-order effect of cheaper-than-their-American co-workers employee - they are being used for the second-order effect of suppressing the demands of all their American workers and helping to keep wages of all of their workers flat over the long-term.