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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.
WTF are you talking about? The amount is for a class action lawsuit not a government fine.
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 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.
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
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.
That's a $200 itunes gift card each, and $300M for the lawyers.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
"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.