“The dollar amount is now on the record,” Robert Faturechi reports for The Los Angeles Times. “Apple, Google and other tech giants accused of artificially suppressing wages by conspiring not to poach each other’s talent have agreed to settle a lawsuit filed by their employees for $324.5 million.”
“The approximate dollar amount, stipulated in settlement records filed in federal court late Thursday, had been an open secret in Silicon Valley in recent weeks, though attorneys had declined to confirm the figure,” Faturechi reports. “It still needs to be approved by U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose. If she does, there will surely be grumbling among tech employees who have publicly complained that Apple, Google, Intel Corp. and Adobe Systems Inc. would be losing just a fraction of the $3 billion they allegedly saved by suppressing wages.”
Faturechi reports, “Each class member is estimated to get a few thousand dollars.”
Read more in the full article here.
Related articles:
Judge Koh: 60,000 Silicon Valley workers may pursue collusion case against Apple, Google, others as group – January 14, 2014
Steve Jobs threatened patent suit to enforce no-hire policy, according to court filing – January 23, 2013
Judge Koh orders Apple CEO Tim Cook to four hours of questioning in anti-poaching case – January 17, 2013
Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe, Intuit, Pixar, and Lucasfilm fail to get staff-poaching antitrust lawsuit dismissed – April 19, 2012
Court filing: Steve Jobs told Google’s Schmidt to stop poaching workers – January 27, 2012
Did Apple CEO Steve Jobs ask Palm’s Colligan to collude? – August 20, 2009
Did Apple and Google make an anti-poaching deal? – August 9, 2009
As with Samesung the proverb is once again proven true: better to be forced into forgiveness by the courts than to seek permission from the ones you’re intending to wrong.
There’s an observational concept being tossed around right now that the biznizz bozo arm of the corporate oligarchy has settled into simply destroying whatever they like now, paying ridiculously low fines for their irresponsibility later. One person I heard called it something to the effect of buying indulgences. (See history of Martin Luther for references).
‘Oops, I made a booboo. Gawd will forgive me when I pay my fine to the church, aka government. Haha! I don’t have to clean up my mess!’
Children at play. #MyStupidGovernment at ‘work’.
I have a novel idea for Judge Koh. Pay the lawyers a few thousand dollars each and each class member a whole lot more.
Bingo. These class action lawsuits are always such bullshit. Lawyers are only ones that benefit. And you get the idea they are fine with settling for lower amounts because they’ll still make millions.
Where is the class action suite by unemployed or underpaid Tech workers displaces or under compensated because of the over use of H1B Visas? I don’t live in the U.S. so this does not affect me but I think the over use of these visas does as much or more harm to wages as this agreement did. But who would you sue the government?