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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?
Let's make US tech workers even less competitive.
Clearly, not enough of the industry has moved overseas yet.
Fair? Cancel all of their H1B visas.
In the end, no worker harmed by this policy will see a dime of the $320m the government is fining them. In the end, $320m is a drop in the bucket for these firms and won't change a thing.
All of the involved companies patent portfolios and trademarks should be seized and placed in the hands of the affected employees so the companies are forced to lease the work that they should have paid more for in the first place.
Well, fair compensation might be hard. Certain people would most definitely been "poached" with higher pay, and/or required counter offers to keep from leaving. And for the ones that did leave, others would have been needed to replace them, requiring "poaching" from the same pool of talent. This should have raised everyone's wages, probably 10% or more a year, every year... This wouldn't have just have had ramifications in Silicone Valley, but nation wide.
In terms of punitive damages, it should cost way more for having done these kinds things than it would have possibly been to have not done them, which means the settlement should cost at least 2-3x the value of lost wages on top of back-payments for all workers for the amount of money they lost plus market rate interests over that time (and by market rate interests I mean rate of S&P or Dow gains, which have been pretty significant over the last 3-4 years).
So I am guessing these 60,000 working are hoping to get enough to retire on, as I imagine they will find finding a job pretty hard after this?
At $324.5 million, that only comes out to $5.4K per person. Which is obviously way too low.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Behavior like this places families into financial distress, screws hardworking people out of careers, and because people are disincentivized to be their best and do their best, it has resulted in the general stagnation of both the skill level and capability in the industry.
The real reason companies can't find qualified people is that the products they are running are programmed by imbeciles at companies that only care about making it good enough thus it's insanely difficult to use, and because you cannot pay me enough at a certain point for me to care about doing it right, much less even competently.
Put them in jail. The upper management. The Middle Management. All of the individuals who participated. End of Story.
Then we can talk about paying people back on wages.
Who's going to start a kick-starter slush-fund to lobby sheriffs departments?
What the fuck does 'fair' have anything to do with anything? This is government meddling with people's private property (businesses) nothing else.
Anybody must be able to 'collude' with anybody in this precise manner for any purpose, it's their business. I must be able to come to an agreement with any company that we will not hire each other's employees or anybody we want for that matter.
THERE IS NO ENTITLEMENT TO ANYBODY'S JOBS and jobs are not there to give you employment, they are there only because the companies need particular things to be done and so they buy labour and government intrusion does only one thing: raises cost of doing business thus providing pretty good incentives to hire in some other countries altogether.
You are not entitled to be hired by anybody no matter what you believe and if you force employer's hands all you are going to get as a response will be pink slips and for a good reason, as the employers shift more and more of their operations somewhere else.
MY OTHER COMMENTS
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
- she wouldn't let Samsung use CLS Bank / Alice to remove Apple's bogus patents.
In general Apple does hate judges and companies and people and things that don't go its way.
Like all petulant children it will eventually be spanked enough to quit being a little crybaby bully.
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.
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
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.
How about making 50 percent of their stock options or paychecks for the period they were working at these companies go towards offsetting the costs the companies punitive damages turn out to be. I mean after all they're the ones responsible for this, not the poor corporations who don't have souls (but do have personhood) that they represent :)
Am I missing it, why is this classified as HP news?
I disagree. These are some of the top employers for the disciplines involved. So, if these top employers depress their employees' salaries, then salaries at competing companies are depressed as well. When one of my employees gets a job offer from Google, we often give them a raise to convince them to stay. The salaries of company's like Apple and Google trickle down to all Silicon Valley professionals and possibly nationwide or even wider. How do you calculate the impact to salaries outside of these just these defendants on tech professionals across the board?
And it was restraint of trade by any measure. The penalty should be severe, assuming the law is to mean anything at all.
I'd be shocked if there was anyone who was still employed there who would ask such a question, for fear of the inevitable repercussions, even if it isn't 'being fired'.
Hang them all from the tallest tree so their festering corpses can be seen for all to fear who believe laws are only for some.
I read this as "Silicon Valley Fights In Order To Pay Bigger Settlement In Tech Talent Hiring Case"
Now that totally reversed what the title was saying!
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
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 are supposed to be intelligent people;, they should have known better than to let themselves get treated like that.
They should have looked out for themselves by voting against the elected officials who support the laws that facilitated the export of American industry.
For example, the tax deduction they get for closing factories. (BTW, there's no deduction for moving the jobs overseas) It's just a break for companies when they fire a bunch of people: loss of future earnings and so on.
They should consider Not voting for people who have business backgrounds that contained moving jobs offshore while laying off American workers. And, yes, I know that some businesses had no choice: it was move or die. Fine, but there is no shortage of American business who have good careers that did not involve being the "Oh I'm sorry, but these things happen. Our hands are tied." kind of jerks. I mean why on earth did anyone with a job that gets a typical paycheck think that voting for Romney was a good idea? Sure, I voted for him but I'm not one of you; I'm one of them.
And secondly, when someone in office is trying to get decent treatment for people who aren't tech workers, maybe the tech community should be able too see that they are in the same boat as the people who do the grunt work at the bottom of society. That "I've got mine" attitude so common in the tech world is why I have no sympathy.
When you sue for damages you are in CIVIL COURT. That is a different system, you can't do jail time and about all you can do is deal with money.
Stealing is a criminal offense; you'd have to find a criminal law on the books you could get them for doing this. I hear that racketeering criminal law was somewhat broad...
As far as the amount of $$ as a civil case one shouldn't be able to sue as punishment but only for damages (which they seem to extend to the limit with mental harm etc.) This big corps always seem to get the money knocked down on some sort of grounds of the harm caused wasn't as big as the $ amount or just bribing judges like the supreme court did with the exon spill.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Yeah $3B sounds fair-ish imho. Or maybe 2x that paid in stock?
"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.
The much bigger question here is why aren't the executives of the relevant firms being criminally prosecuted under the RICO act? If we really want to see an end to these kinds of practises, a few of the people at the top need to be seen doing the perp walk. Fining a few of the world's richest corporations even a few billion dollars will be totally ineffective, they'll just put it down as a cost of doing business and I can guarantee you they won't then start to hire each other's staff aftewards.
my blog of work misery - http://beastofbaystreet.com
Tech workers should get unionized and then they will be able to stand up for there rights. Also we need to unlink healthcare form jobs.
Treble damages (punatively),
Fire and strip relevant professional credentials from any cooperative staff (up to C-level)
Agressively cap lawyers fees (punatively),
*and finally, but most importantly*
Bar all companies from using and even lobbying for the H1B visa program (for at least as long as the agreement existed)
I think something like 5% of salary per year times 2 or 3 is about right. Some were certainly hurt more than this, some less. So $10K-$15K per year is about right per.
Seems odd to use HP's logo when there are a bunch of other companies mentioned and HP is not one of them.
It's restraint of trade, anti-competitive and collusion. It's cost-fixing as opposed to price-fixing.
If these companies had done this in terms of their product pricing and marketing they would be facing severe penalties. Calling it "No Poaching" is the companies own, self-interested term for what they were doing.
These companies are very interested in "fairness", "justice" and "Capitalism" when it benefits them. They become distressingly authoritarian and dictatorial when the market works against them. But they don't like the odour or appearance of dictatorship and so come up with weasel words like "poaching". Poaching is the illegal hunting and gathering of wildlife.
How many IT folks like being thought of as "wildlife"? Are we ducks and trees? How dehumanizing is that?
With a class action, the consumer/employee gets something for nothing.
Don't like it? Then hire your own damn lawyer to file your own damn case, with years of your life and tens of thousands of your own dollars on the line.
techhiring gone wrong.