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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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
Umm, Google doesn't define detailed requirements for technical positions. In fact, they don't even hire people for specific positions. The interview and hiring process is all about identifying people who are smart and can think on their feet, and decisions about what projects to put them on come after the hiring decision has been made. It's expected that almost nothing you know from any previous job will even apply at Google because the environment and tools are so different (everything is custom, in-house).
What you're describing definitely does happen -- I've seen it! -- but it's not relevant at the companies involved here.
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