Can any member of the class lawsuit here comment on the settlement? How did that work out for you?
How Apple, Google, and other tech companies conspired against their own workers
31–40 of 289 posts
Re: How Apple, Google, and other tech companies conspired against their own workers
#32Notice the difference: " Top executives of leading tech companies secretly agreed among themselves not to hire each other’s employees" "...brought charges against the companies " They should have been indicting both, or just the executives for their explicit role in this criminal behavior. I really detest the lack of individual accountability in all these cases when we deal with large companies. If this was a couple…
I would agree with both. But bringing charges against a company is important. Boards of directors are supposed to, well, direct the executives, not look the other way while they break the law and abuse their employees. The way to encourage this is to hit the company, hard, right in the wallet.
It has been shown repeatedly that boards won't do much and repeated fines are more and more just another cost of business. Either the fines need to be raised to a level where the company loses profit for one or more years or we need to go after individuals.
Re: How Apple, Google, and other tech companies conspired against their own workers
#33Notice the difference: " Top executives of leading tech companies secretly agreed among themselves not to hire each other’s employees" "...brought charges against the companies " They should have been indicting both, or just the executives for their explicit role in this criminal behavior. I really detest the lack of individual accountability in all these cases when we deal with large companies. If this was a couple…
I agree, there is far too much ability to transfer liability in the modern world which lets this sort of stuff get abstract and easier to dismiss. Companies should be held accountable to the extent their growth has encouraged bad behavior, but individuals at that company committed the behavior and, if they were instructed to do so and blindly followed then... 1. "Just following orders" isn't now and has never been a…
"Just following orders" was a valid excuse until the Nuremberg trials.
Re: How Apple, Google, and other tech companies conspired against their own workers
#34> A separate class action lawsuit was filed on behalf of 64,000 tech workers for an estimated $3 billion in lost wages. Before the case went to trial, the companies settled for a total of $435 million.
How would we know if they resumed the bad behavior?
Re: How Apple, Google, and other tech companies conspired against their own workers
#35The settlement is laughable given the number of people whose salaries were held down as a result of this collusion. It's not just workers at these companies that suffer. It has a network effect of holding salaries down at companies which aren't even colluding.
Another example of (usually giant) companies deciding to risk breaking the law because its cheaper in the long run to do so.
Re: How Apple, Google, and other tech companies conspired against their own workers
#36So while this is bad... I don't know how to feel about this. The other side of the coin is that these companies pay WAY ABOVE average salaries. I'm intimately familiar with this having FAANG companies average of 50% more compensation than average. Especially outside of the bay area. Typical range TC Sr. SDE in nyc: 150-250k + Bonus. Typical range TC for Sr. SDE in nyc: for Google/Facebook/Amazon 300-400k ( and goes h…
> So while this is bad... I don't know how to feel about this.
Just to be clear: you are saying it's possibly ok for a cartel of billionaires to collude to suppress wages for a bunch of people making six figures? Because those employees have it "pretty good" and should be happy with what they're given, even though they are working to build world-historical fortunes and power for the business owners?
Re: How Apple, Google, and other tech companies conspired against their own workers
#37Can any member of the class lawsuit here comment on the settlement? How did that work out for you?
Not a member of that class but one of the things that happened as a result of these revelations was that everyone at Google got a large raise (much larger than typical annual raises) and a substantial one-time cash bonus which appeared to be, during the announcement, just Eric being Uncle Moneybags but just after the all-hands we all found out the reason from the newspapers.
Re: How Apple, Google, and other tech companies conspired against their own workers
#38> A separate class action lawsuit was filed on behalf of 64,000 tech workers for an estimated $3 billion in lost wages. Before the case went to trial, the companies settled for a total of $435 million. How would we know if they resumed the bad behavior?
That's only $6796.87 per person.
Re: How Apple, Google, and other tech companies conspired against their own workers
#39It should be possible to crunch through LinkedIn histories and determine where there's collusion between employers. If moves between employer A and employer B are lower than between A to C and C to B, something funny is going on.
With something as complex as employment decisions, there could be a lot of confounding factors. Example: What if A and B are located somewhere more desirable? There may naturally be a desire to stay where you are and less impetus to move. A and B might be in a class of company which confers more prestige, so there would be less impetus to move. A and B might entail more risk somehow. There are many of these. Using bu…
If A and B are both located in desirable locations, and C is not, then the strangeness of there being more A->C->B jumps than A->B is only stronger.
If A and B are in the same desirable location, all the weirder.
Re: How Apple, Google, and other tech companies conspired against their own workers
#40This happened but it's old news. I remember when they announced the raise we got as a result. If you never heard of it, you weren't affected.