4 ms·

> wages were probably below what they should've been for years... Not only that... tech companies like Apple, Adobe, Pixar, Google, Intel, eBay, Lucasfilm, and

by beambot 11y ago

> wages were probably below what they should've been for years... Not only that... tech companies like Apple, Adobe, Pixar, Google, Intel, eBay, Lucasfilm, and Intuit all illegally colluded to keep them low. The settlement for the affected workers was appallingly low! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

0x5f3759df-i 11y ago
>On September 8, 2014, Judge Koh set April 9, 2015 as the actual trial date for the remaining defendants, with a pre-trial conference scheduled for December 19, 2014. Also, as of early September 2014, the defendants had re-entered mediation to determine whether a new settlement could be reached. Wikipedia seems out of date, what was the final result?
- jmorrow977 11y ago
  Apparently the payment is increased to $415M, which in my opinion is still too low. https://pando.com/2015/04/14/apple-wage-fixing-plaintiff-accuses-execs-of-hypocrisy-over-discriminatory-labor-policy/ https://pando.com/2015/04/14/apple-wage-fixing-plaintiff-acc...
AnkhMorporkian 11y ago
I agree that the settlement was definitely low, but I really disagree that the settlement was absurdly low on aggregate. I've always done freelance/contract work, so I'm not 100% sure what 'significantly' better means in the normal software world, but I'm going to assume 5k/year would be a really significant raise. I know the national average is somewhere around 3%, so 5k seems like it would be absurdly more than average. Please do correct me if I'm wrong. So, just going on $5,000 lost for a year for the 64,000 litigants, that's $320,000,000. They settled for $324,000,000. I swear I didn't presuppose any of those numbers, they just worked out like that.
- slewis 11y ago
  The period in question is 4 years so multiply by 4 (although not all litigants were present during all 4 years so you can back it off a little). And 5k is too low. Google gave a 10% raise across the board around the time this information came out. So assume 150k salary * 10% = 15k. Salaries also continued to rise more rapidly after the 10% raise, but it's hard to say by how much without having access to the internal data.
  - AnkhMorporkian 11y ago
    I'm not being snarky; where does 4 years come from? Do we have start/end dates on when the agreement was formed/ended? If we do, then I'm totally willing to revise my judgement on this. Also, 10% from Google does not translate to 10% across the board, only to any employees who would be hired by Google, which would surely not be 100%.
    - beambot 11y ago
      From the linked wikipedia article: "The civil class action which was filed by five plaintiffs, one of whom has died, accused the tech companies of collusion to not recruit one another's employees between 2005 and 2009." Hence 4 years of wage suppression. Given tech salaries in SV, $5k is off by about an order of magnitude -- especially when you consider the knock-on effects of job mobility that was systemically quashed by collusion (i.e. moving jobs => better pay => faster career progression => compounded earnings).
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
    - slewis 11y ago
      Your first question is answered by beambot. The 10% argument is that Google felt it had to raise salaries by that much for everyone after collusion ended, in order to retain employees.
- wyago 11y ago

by beambot 11y ago

0x5f3759df-i 11y ago

>On September 8, 2014, Judge Koh set April 9, 2015 as the actual trial date for the remaining defendants, with a pre-trial conference scheduled for December 19, 2014. Also, as of early September 2014, the defendants had re-entered mediation to determine whether a new settlement could be reached. Wikipedia seems out of date, what was the final result?

jmorrow977 11y ago
Apparently the payment is increased to $415M, which in my opinion is still too low. https://pando.com/2015/04/14/apple-wage-fixing-plaintiff-accuses-execs-of-hypocrisy-over-discriminatory-labor-policy/ https://pando.com/2015/04/14/apple-wage-fixing-plaintiff-acc...

AnkhMorporkian 11y ago

I agree that the settlement was definitely low, but I really disagree that the settlement was absurdly low on aggregate. I've always done freelance/contract work, so I'm not 100% sure what 'significantly' better means in the normal software world, but I'm going to assume 5k/year would be a really significant raise. I know the national average is somewhere around 3%, so 5k seems like it would be absurdly more than average. Please do correct me if I'm wrong. So, just going on $5,000 lost for a year for the 64,000 litigants, that's $320,000,000. They settled for $324,000,000. I swear I didn't presuppose any of those numbers, they just worked out like that.

slewis 11y ago
The period in question is 4 years so multiply by 4 (although not all litigants were present during all 4 years so you can back it off a little). And 5k is too low. Google gave a 10% raise across the board around the time this information came out. So assume 150k salary * 10% = 15k. Salaries also continued to rise more rapidly after the 10% raise, but it's hard to say by how much without having access to the internal data.
- AnkhMorporkian 11y ago
  I'm not being snarky; where does 4 years come from? Do we have start/end dates on when the agreement was formed/ended? If we do, then I'm totally willing to revise my judgement on this. Also, 10% from Google does not translate to 10% across the board, only to any employees who would be hired by Google, which would surely not be 100%.
  - beambot 11y ago
    From the linked wikipedia article: "The civil class action which was filed by five plaintiffs, one of whom has died, accused the tech companies of collusion to not recruit one another's employees between 2005 and 2009." Hence 4 years of wage suppression. Given tech salaries in SV, $5k is off by about an order of magnitude -- especially when you consider the knock-on effects of job mobility that was systemically quashed by collusion (i.e. moving jobs => better pay => faster career progression => compounded earnings).
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  - slewis 11y ago
    Your first question is answered by beambot. The 10% argument is that Google felt it had to raise salaries by that much for everyone after collusion ended, in order to retain employees.
wyago 11y ago