“Roughly 60,000 Silicon Valley workers won clearance to pursue a lawsuit accusing Apple Inc, Google Inc and other companies of conspiring to drive down pay by not poaching each other’s staff, after a federal appeals court refused to let the defendants appeal a class certification order,” Jonathan Stempel reports for Reuters. “The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals late on Tuesday let stand an order by U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California to let the workers sue as a group, and pursue what the defendants said could exceed $9 billion of damages.”
“The case began in 2011 when five software engineers sued Apple, Google, Adobe Systems Inc, Intel Corp and others over an alleged ‘overarching conspiracy’ to suppress pay by agreeing not to recruit or hire each other’s employees,” Stempel reports. “Class certification can make it easier for plaintiffs to extract larger awards, at lower cost than if they sued individually. It could also add pressure on defendants to settle.”
“In seeking the appeal, the companies had called Koh’s order ‘manifestly erroneous.’ They said that the claims were too disparate because they covered employees with 2,400 job titles at seven companies, and that the plaintiffs did not allege any impact on total hiring,” Stempel reports. “Much of the case was built on emails between top officials, including the late Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs and former Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, that the plaintiffs said reflected understandings not to raid each other’s talent.”
Read more in the full article here.
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