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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?
Google has an open meeting every Thursday. Open to employees, anyone can ask a question. I'd be really curious if they have an honest response as to why they are fighting or how they justify their previous actions.
You have to wonder how much the employees were really hurt by this. It was a 'no poaching' agreement. That meant that recruiters from those companies weren't going to call down the entire Rolodex of the competing firms and try to recruit. But.... there are nothing stopping external recruiters from doing that. And there was nothing stopping individuals from switching on their own.
There's some logic to an agreement like that. Each of these firm's recruiters could waste huge amounts of employee time in their competitors by making thousand of recruiting calls.
The thing we really need here is public justice. If the world does not know how these ultra rich are conspiring against them, then there is no justice. They need to unseal all of the evidence, no exceptions.
Also I think it's important to note one of the plaintiffs (Michael Devine) who pushed the judge into ruling against this, the lawyers wanted to walk away with their check.
From a May 2014 CNET article
Plaintiff fights Apple, Google settlement in wage-fixing suit
A programmer who is part of the class action lawsuit against several tech giants says $324 million isn't enough.
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"As an analogy," Devine wrote to Koh, according to the Times, "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."
Had the case gone to trial as planned at the end of May, court filings indicate, the tech employees would have sought $3 billion. Lucasfilm, Pixar, and Intuit agreed to settle last year for a combined $20 million, covering 8 percent of the employees named in the suit.
meep
That's a $200 itunes gift card each, and $300M for the lawyers.
They could look where companies didn't participate in this crime. Look at the top salaries(over the time period), subtract the salaries that people affected did get, multiply that by 60,000, multiply that by some punitive number, tag on a hefty percentage to make up for the lawyer's fees, and Bob's your uncle.
So let's say the top competitive salaries were $150,000 and that people got $100,000 (probably a much larger spread), and that this all went on for an average of 5 years. So:
5*50,000*1.5*1.3*60,000 which works out to around 29,250,000,000 or basically 30 billion dollars.
Considering the amount of money these companies make from each employee this is actually a fairly reasonable number. Considering that this is 60,000 top tech people who then often lived in very expensive parts of the US their losses from these illegal actions were not insubstantial.
My above numbers also assume a $50,000 dollar gap. Often with stocks and bonuses companies that weren't part of this cartel paid much higher, I know one top tier school math grad who is earning solidly in the $300,000 plus lots of perks and bonuses right out of school working for a large SF tech company.
To put the $324.5 in perspective, a top employee who comes up with a cool feature or new product line could easily have generated that much profit for any one of the larger tech companies. An interesting example of this was in the history of GTA (which I recently read) where the original game had you playing the cops. It was apparently boring as hell. But some enterprising employee swapped it around and it was instant fun. That one guy effectively put the company on the map. The other game might have sent the company into the dusty shelves of mediocre game history.
It is not that all 60,000 of the people in the lawsuit would generate that much money but that I suspect at least one of them did.
It is a government actions, specifically this lawsuit is based on the federal anti-trust laws, which are completely unconstitutional and illegal and detrimental to the economy in every way.
MY OTHER COMMENTS
> It's a class action. The only person that is really winning here is the lawyer that is getting $150,000,000 for bringing the suit.
No. This case is different. Those lawyers were all set to sell out the people in the class for peanuts - they were happy to do it because they were getting the lion's share of the money. But the judge said fuck no! and put the kibosh on that collaboration and said that it wasn't fair to the actual people who got screwed over. I am not much of a court watcher but having a judge slap down the plantifs' lawyer for not working hard enough seems like a rarity in the modern legal system. A tiny push back against the country-club set screwing over the plebes.
Yes, the current economic collapse in USA can be traced all the way down to the first anti-trust act against Standard Oil. That massive breach of legality, enormous unconstitutional, illegal seizure of private property and destruction of the very principles that America was founded upon, that was the starting point for the demise of the most powerful economic engine of 19th century.
MY OTHER COMMENTS
Yes, they absolutely were. The only way to get raises these days is to find a new job, no this is not restricted to Silicon Valley. If you sit in the same job you will be lucky to get a wage increase close to the cost of living increase each year. This particular illegal activity restricted people from getting new higher paying jobs, for years. Even if they were qualified for the jobs (which these same companies claim don't exist and lobby for increases in H1B people).
The 60,000 people that were impacted by this particular crime will see maybe 1,000.00, so the punishment is not severe enough. The judge should cap the attorney fees on this and quadruple the fine to ensure fair compensation for the people harmed by these criminal acts.
If this sounds harsh, consider that some of the executives responsible are making 100 times the wage of the employees harmed by their crimes. Perhaps they should get fired and face personal liability to their previous employers for their criminal activities.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.