Judge Denies Class Action Status In Tech Workers' Lawsuit 103
We've mentioned a few times the "gentleman's agreements" which some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley used to reduce the risk of employee poaching. walterbyrd writes "This comes from the same judge who awarded Apple $1 billion from Samsung. 'A federal judge on Friday struck down an effort to form a class action lawsuit to go after Apple, Google and five other technology companies for allegedly forming an illegal cartel to tamp down workers' wages and prevent the loss of their best engineers during a multiyear conspiracy broken up by government regulators.'" The lawsuit itself is ongoing (thanks to a ruling last year by the same judge); it's just that the plaintiff's claims cannot be combined.
Re:Don't Be Evil (Score:2, Interesting)
I encountered the same thing as a Symantec employee. I had accepted an offer to jump ship and go to McAfee and was about to give notice when I got a call from a mid-level manager who openly stated that they had a gentleman's agreement not to hire each other's employees. Keep in mind I was not poached but had approached McAfee for a completely different position than the one I was currently serving at Symantec.
Not just them doing it. (Score:3, Interesting)
A computer security company called Accuvant in Colorado has a neat little 'no hire' agreement with over 70 partner companies. Including Symantec, McAfee, Palo Alto and other big names in computer security as well as other consulting companies like Dyntek. Essentially if you work for them you cannot be hired by any of those companies. There is no extra pay to the employee or other compensation for it as well. They use that as a means of limiting what they pay their employees. Of course you don't hear about it until after you've been hired and been brought into the system. At that point you find a lot of the common career progression paths immediately blocked by their agreement.
Re:Class action lawsuits are a scam anyway (Score:5, Interesting)
Stupid winger bullshit. The people in the class action suit take zero risk, which means if the suit is successful they literally get money for nothing. Whereas if the case is lost, the lawyers are on the hook for the entire cost of the case - which can be enormous if there are a few hundred thousand documents to parse and dozens of staffers to pay salaries for.
Don't like it, take your own damn risk and hire your own damn lawyer.
But of course no one is going to do that if the amount they've been stiffed is less than the cost of even filing in small claims court. The only solutions are class action lawsuits, or government agencies cracking the whip. But of course, the sort of useful idiots (for the corporations) that hate class action lawsuits also hate government oversight.