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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.
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).
WTF are you talking about? The amount is for a class action lawsuit not a government fine.
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.
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
None of this is even close to be legal (Constitutional). Government has no authority to prevent private individuals or business owners from coming to mutual agreements of any kind, including this.
These laws are destroying USA, when the country's economy is obliterated none of these laws will mean anything at all because there will be nobody to apply them to.
MY OTHER COMMENTS
This isn't a government action. It's a class action lawsuit by former employees.
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.
What the fuck does 'fair' have anything to do with anything? This is government meddling with people's private property (businesses) nothing else.
How exactly is a lawsuit by private citizens "government meddling"?
I work in the Buenos Aires office of a big global company. Every day I hear conversations in several European languages. People from France -for example- come here to work and we all get paid the same. An entry-level position pays about twice as an average salary (~1000 USD / month) and experienced people can get much more.
At first it seems a terrible choice. Indeed, I and most of my friends plan to leverage our european citizenships in order to travel to Europe / USA, work hard and earn lots of euros, and come back to buy a house - something that today is impossibly expensive. But then you look at it from the immigrant's point of view: an average guy finds himself living in the top 5% of a country. He gets all the girls he can possibly want (because he is taller, foreigner, etc) and belongs a strong community of expatriates.
I also suffer from globalization. Indians can also do the same work I do, and they cost only 100 / month. The moral of the story is this: programming can be done by anyone. Supply of programmers has multiplied faster than demand - don't expect the price to stand still. Jump from USA programmer to third-world middle-manager and your net income in USD won't fall too much.
Many US companies have tried moving overseas, only to see that it's ineffective. Offshoring is not new. If it were the panacea that you're implying, every single company would have already done it--but that hasn't happened. For the same reason, most startups occur in the United States. You are just pushing a political opinion that is not based on any facts or reality.
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
Clearly a lie motivated by your politics. The entire case would not exist without the attorneys working on it for contigency fees. Then, at worst, the attorneys get 1/3. That means the class-action defendents will get 2/3rds of whatever is recovered. Then, going forward, every engineer in the United States will benefit in perpetuity by the increased salaries that are an absolute result of this.
If any companies had wanted to expatriate, they would have already done so. They stay in an expensive place such as Silicon Valley precisely because of the quality of the talent there.
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.
Obviously someone does not know that we in America have a law called the Sherman Anti-Trust Act that has been on the books for over 100 years. Please take your Ayn Rand fantasies into some right wing hothouse where you belong, "Lucky One". Or better yet: Pah-shole na hooey.
A group of companies agreeing not to raise workers' wages so they don't entice them away from each other is the essence of non-competition.
How exactly is a lawsuit by private citizens "government meddling"?
That lawsuit takes place in a government court, and only gets enforced through threat of force, by government.
Not saying it shouldn't happen, but it's very much an action of government.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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
Government has no authority to prevent private individuals or business owners from coming to mutual agreements of any kind, including this.
Mr. Rockefeller, there is a Ted Roosevelt on line one.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Which would have no teeth, if it weren't for employment laws enabling the lawsuit. That's the government action behind the lawsuit.
As to the conflict here, I don't see compelling interests on either side. As the original poster noted, allowing businesses to collude in hiring would encourage them to employ US workers. OTOH, it's not that much of an incentive.
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
324 million divided by 60,000 is $5,400 per person. Before Lawyers tax their share.
In reality those 60,000 people will see less than $2500 each.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Which is fine. The alternative would be for the citizens to lynch the managers who perpetrated this and take their money by force.
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?
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.
I was wondering the same thing. AFAIK, HP isn't even involved in the case, so it borders on libel to link their logo with this story.
We are the 198 proof..
That is your personal opinion and does not reflect over a century of case law. I should have said "I believe this is completely unconstitutional even though every properly constituted court of law has held otherwise, because my opinion is all that matters".
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
Looks like someone who is still living at home, supported by his parents, read Atlas Shrugged.
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
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
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 gives you that entitlement and what powers allow you to take that right from others?
Again, where does this entitlement come from? Also, do you realize that this is why these tech companies want the h1b visa's. Because they cannot easily be poached by other companies and their salaries are pretty constant.
Where is it guaranteed?
What? Ok, you completely lost me on this one. Are you just picking things out of a couple of newspapers and ranting about them?
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.
HP made the printer the story was originally printed on before looking the link up and posting it.
Big companies like state street bank in boston are wising up that the amount and quality of work they get from offshoring isn't worth the expense (additional equipment, expense of multiple places in which to do expensive due diligence and oversight to meet regulatory requirements) and management difficulty. They are bringing jobs back onshore. I know this because I just finished a contract for them developing the procedures for moving jobs back to the US.
So now you know why those bastards want the H1B visa quota increased: putting jobs offshore with cheap workers doesn't work; let's bring the cheap workers here!
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
They're intelligent at coding, not dirty business tricks.
Right, as if tech jobs are easily available that are not being manipulated in a dishonest way.
This voting coulda-shoulda would take decades to have an effect, if at all. What about righting the wrong that has already occurred instead of blaming some other issue? If X is the amount robbed from each plaintiff, he/she should get paid X + punitive damages. It's that simple. Why are the judges and lawyers acting intentionally dumb? Let's say, each person lost an average $10,000/year. Then they are owed about $10,000 x 7 = 70,000 minimum, not $5,000. But these companies refuse to pay the fair amount. It's like a common man getting a $200 speeding ticket, but he says he's willing to pay only $10.
The law is whatever the courts rule. It really is that simple and that capricious.
Yes, but to take that to its logical conclusion, we can take those judges in that court outside to the nearest tree and hang them.
Then get ourselves some new judges who I'm sure will be much more willing to issue rules that we like more.
Our government today doesn't look much like it did 200 years ago, and it sure doesn't fit very well with what the founders of this country had in mind.
Maybe that is ok, maybe it isn't... but I think you'd be hard pressed to say that it hasn't changed to something completely different. Reconstruction and the Civil War had a lot to do with that, but other events in the early 20th century did as well.
Put them in jail. The upper management. The Middle Management. All of the individuals who participated. End of Story.
You can't put people in jail who haven't be convicted of a crime...
And they aren't even being charged with one, this is a civil lawsuit...
You do not have the right to start a cabal.
1. I have the right to do anything I want.
2. You have the right to try and stop me.
Those are the only two truths in the world, everything else is just feel good nonsense...
Companies are made up of people, people in general tend to do what is in their own best interest.
Nothing new here...
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.
Ok, so now we're not suing the companies, we're suing the CEO and executives?
Are they are party to this lawsuit? Did they personally do any of this? How much did they know?
In any case, any "judgement" you place on them would just be paid by the companies anyway, so what difference does it make?
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.
Maybe, or perhaps it will kick up campaign spending 10 fold...
Apple could afford to spend a billion dollars a year on politicians without really noticing...
That would have... an effect... many of them actually... Frankly, I'm surprised at how little some of these companies spend on lobbing and other government... payments...
"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.
You're joking, right? Antitrust laws are only detrimental to one aspect of the economy: the unregulated ability for a few individuals or corporations to make an obscene amount of money at the expense of everyone else. When a monopoly exists, it gains an incredible amount of power over the free market that is not easy to overcome. At that point, a free market no longer realistically exists without government intervention, because the ability to break into that market becomes hopelessly compromised. To the extent that free markets are generally considered to be the epitome of a good economic system these days, clearly any government intervention required to ensure that such free markets continue to exist is justified, legal, and constitutional.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Which is fine. The alternative would be for the citizens to lynch the managers who perpetrated this and take their money by force.
Well, it's well and good to say it's "fine", but barring that actually happening, nothing will actually change. Some lawyers will get rich, and these corporations will continue to act like shitbags.
So yeah, we gain some things with a legal system, but we lose some things, too. I'm glad to see racially-motivated lynchings reduced, but I'm sorry to see the same for financially-motivated ones.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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
Spoken like a true criminal mind...
C|N>K
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.
Officers of companies are liable just remove there ability to sit on a board of a company - then the share holders go of sorry Eric you are banned from being a board member you have made your self unemployable hers your statutory redundancy and thanks for all your work - oh and those un vested stock options we will have those back thank you
MM do you really want old school Industrial relations could make hitting key deployment dates interesting sorry boss my rsi is playing up something chronic oh what that a fat brown envelope in my lunch box I suddenly feel much better :-)
I have a mate who now works in HR for a FSTE 100 company who used to work in heavy industry and he commented even the tea boy got a grand bung - this was when the average salary was around 2k.
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.
This is a civil case, not a criminal one.
Or do you want to throw out the law and just be a dictatorship?
To do what you suggest requires that an existing law be broken, someone be brought to trial, and be convicted by a jury of his/her peers.
The restitution the plaintiff are seeking cannot include what you're asking.
No, it is spoken like someone who accepts reality and human nature.
Parents beat their children all the time. Some cultures accept this, others do not.
It used to be acceptable in the US, it has largely become not acceptable anymore.
So does this mean it doesn't happen? Of course not, parents can do whatever they want, they are free human beings. You can try and stop them, that is what child protective services is for. You can call them, if they find abused children they have the power to remove them from the home. This power is granted to them by people like you and me, backed up by the sheriffs dept who will use force if needed to back up our will.
Because frankly, I don't want it to happen, so I will try and stop it via the laws we pass and by paying my taxes to fund CPS and the law enforcement agencies who will protect kids when their own parents abuse them.
But none of that removes the parents right to abuse their kids. It just means that other people have the right to remove their ability to be parents.
My experience is they never think creatively. They can come up with one solution and if that does not fly for some reason, they are toast.
I have worked with a few who were okay but with so many who were just not that bright.
Finally, you need to watch your correct use of the English language, guy. When I saw "rote" instead of the correct "wrote", it was hard to take your ideas seriously. Just sayin'...
Sorry that's how civil law works if a director of a company Is deemed not fit and proper by the regulators that's it. break securities laws and you can be bared for a period or even life - the company's have admitted the breach of the anti trust law already.
But that isn't what is happening in this case...
This is a civil lawsuit, not a criminal case brought by regulators...
The companies have not admitted anything, they are offering to settle without admitting wrongdoing.
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.