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.
But (Score:3)
But they're mere workers.
Don't forgot (Score:3, Insightful)
No (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Don't forgot (Score:5, Insightful)
Judges are politicians in robes. If they are of a certain ideological bent, they don't need any special reason to beat down the "peons" because they simply don't believe that workers have rights. Beating down the peons is part of their world-view, the same world-view that probably sees the CEOs and the ownership class as the "makers" and the people who are lucky enough to be employed by those companies as the "takers" because...free markets/em>! and because there's a world full of grateful third worlders who would jump at the chance to do those jobs for fifty cents an hour and all the rice they can eat.
Maybe you're underestimating just how far the corporatist/conservative/libertarian worldview has fallen to the dark side.
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Please do not lump libertarians in with them, the Libertarian Party of America may be not hing more than a ultra conservative branch of republicanism, but real libertarians views have nothing to do with them, and would certainly put the liberty of a person over the financial gain of a paper entity.
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If you did that it would make you liberal not libetarian. Libetarian is not the name of any political philosophy. It is only the name of the philosophy of the so called liberatarian party. The phisosophy the libetarian party claim to follow is called liberal and the philosophy they actually do follow is called facist.
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Oh well... they were unrelated before. But who cares about what was before, it is important what is after the trial.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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Oh wait, America doesn't have class, right?
Dennis: "You're fooling yourselves. We're living in a dictatorship, in which the working classes ..."
Old Woman: "Oh, there you go bringing class into it again."
Dennis: "But that's what it's all about. If only people would see."
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strange men, dressed in flowing robes, distributing justice, is no basis for a system of legal review
Re:Don't forgot (Score:4, Informative)
The judge in question is Lucy Koh. That pretty much says it all.
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I don't get how this even applies? The judge didn't even rule on $1B from samsung, which wasn't even awarded. The only direction apple's heading towards earning is zero, or less than what it stands at now - assuming that even sticks. While the premise (losing out on class action) sucks, it and simply being the same judge has no relation to anything involving the samsung vs apple case, of which apparently the submitter can't even get information right.
Not only that, but what exactly is a "Ruling class" and
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well, nobody likes a poor thief...
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because we all can vote, retard.
Is this such a bad thing? (Score:1, Funny)
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Programmers jumping around from job to job while their salaries keep soaring.
You're right! That behaviour is explicitly reserved for the C-level execs, not some uppity peon programmers...
Silicon Valley companies. (Score:1)
Programmers jumping around from job to job while their salaries keep soaring. Eventually they're asking for so much money that companies decide to just not hire them.
That's not true where I live. Maybe out in CA - which I think the tech market in Silicon is in it's own little World.
Salaries peaked in the late 90s- early - '00s. And that happened to be when :
Globalization really took off.
Changes in technology. Most of work I had in the late 90s was distributed systems on Unix/Linux/Windows - writing the middle ware (in C++), the data transfer to RDBMs, and other stuff that folks just don't do anymore.
Really, who writes their own middleware anymore? They go with a soluti
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"Really, who writes their own middleware anymore? "
The military or anyone that wants to not be exploited and hacked within seconds.
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"Really, who writes their own middleware anymore? "
The military or anyone that wants to not be exploited and hacked within seconds.
That makes for nice Slashdot rhetoric, but it's not true in reality. The record business being done by those solution companies and the almost complete disappearance of middle ware develop jobs proves it.
I know a manager that stopped posting development jobs because they would get over a hundred qualified applicants. They just ask their current employees for referrals now.
This programmer shortage is only in the minds of a very loud minority and isn't reality.
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I'd love to see their faces when you tell half of your programming staff that they get paid less than their immediate peers because they chose to live in a less hip ZIP-code. That doesn't go over well.
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I think if the Silicon Valley companies look outside of their little World and realize that, for one, their technology isn't so groundbreaking after all, and for another, maybe could move development operations to let's say, Metro Atlanta where Lockheed just canned a bunch of really talented guys?
Hear, hear!
It amazes me how many people in SV consider themselves cosmopolitan, or even "global citizens", yet are in fact incredibly insular and provincial. It's as though they have world maps with only two places marked on them: SV and India.
Get a clue folks. SV is but one small part of America, and there are many others with substantial amounts of tech talent. If you have trouble hiring good people at a reasonable price, instead of screaming for more H-1B's, take a look at Google Maps for some of tho
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you know, I thought the same thing while the .com bubble was rocking. In retrospect, I say make hay while the sun shines and extract as much money from them when you can while you can. I can assure you they will afford you that complementary courtesy when the bubble turns, not matter how you behave when it's your turn.
Don't Be Evil (Score:5, Informative)
Documents filed in the lawsuit indicated executives knew they were behaving badly. Both [Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Google] Schmidt and Intel CEO Paul Otellini indicated that they were worried about the anti-recruiting agreements being discovered, according to declarations cited in Koh's ruling. Nevertheless, Schmidt still fired a Google recruiter who riled Jobs by contacting an Apple employee, according to evidence submitted in the case.
Well that seems a bit evil, wouldn't you say?
Re:Don't Be Evil (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah, I see someone beat me to it. Of course, you and/or I will be modded down for saying this.
I expect this sort of behavior from the Apples and Microsofts of the tech industry. And as a prospective employee, I know what to expect. But Google wants to put themselves up as morally superior to these companies. In my opinion, this makes them worse.
As for the case, okay, they can't call it a class action suit. But they can pool their money, hire the best legal team money can buy, hire a good PR company that will inundate the media with David and Goliath stories and find a candidate with the best case. Try this thing in the press. Cockroaches hate the light of day. Make then scurry.
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Try this thing in the press.
It may be hard to get the general public's sympathy for the poor exploited workers who are dissatisfied with making only twice what ordinary people do.
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It may be hard to get the general public's sympathy for the poor exploited workers who are dissatisfied with making only twice what ordinary people do.
Not at all, and I've successfully tried it. The popular perception of programmers, engineers, etc. is of people who've done reasonably well through talent, education and work. It's hardly the 0.01% that own the government, and the general public knows that. People who aren't quite as successful financially generally don't resent it, and maybe have a cousin who's done it or a kid they hope will do it. The general public still rightfully categorize programmers, etc. who work for a living and are subject to ge
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Why would you think this would matter? Nobody's going to boycott Google. None of us are their customers, remember? And I'm betting the stock market likes the idea of pushing down wages.
There's nothing better for oligarchs than 10% unemployment, because that makes just about any hiring environment a monosopy.
If we
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The issue isn't about a boycott. It is about bringing a successful lawsuit against the companies involved.
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If we had a Justice Department that was worth a damn, there would be criminal anti-trust cases brought against Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc like right now.
If we had a Justice Department worth a damn, those cases would have to take a back seat to the criminal fraud cases in the finance industry. Search on William K. Black for a earful on that. He helped prosecute over 1000 successful criminal fraud convictions arising from the S&L crisis. Similar prosecutions in the Great Recession: zero.
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He's one of the best voices on the financial industry.
Coincidentally, I was just reading a New Yorker article from back in September/October (before the election) on how the financial reform bill was blown up by Wall Street lobbyists, and William Black is quoted extensively.
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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.
Netcraft confirm Googl sez "Yes, Be Evillll !!!!" (Score:2)
Epic fail (Score:3)
The judge made one truly epic level bad decision with the Apple Samsung case, is anyone surprised she did the same thing with another case? The whole situation is deplorable and needs a significant legal remedy to prevent it from ever happening again.
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The judge made one truly epic level bad decision with the Apple Samsung case, is anyone surprised she did the same thing with another case? The whole situation is deplorable and needs a significant legal remedy to prevent it from ever happening again.
What "truly epic level bad decision"? And what appellate or Supreme Court precedents can you point to as evidence of her error? Or is this just really "something happened that you disagree with"?
For example, if you're referring to the Hogan thing where Samsung may have concealed evidence of potential bias until they had a decision against them, that's not going to be enough. Or if you're referring to Apple not getting a preliminary injunction since money damages could be enough to compensate them, then tha
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> What "truly epic level bad decision"?
The obvious conflict of interest of the patent troll wannabe serving as jury foreman. The moment he started he started running his mouth off, the whole thing should have been declared a mistrial.
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> What "truly epic level bad decision"?
The obvious conflict of interest of the patent troll wannabe serving as jury foreman. The moment he started he started running his mouth off, the whole thing should have been declared a mistrial.
He didn't run his mouth off until after the trial was over and judgement was settled. Are you saying juries should never be able to talk about their experience after the fact? How does that not violate their first amendment rights?
As for the potential conflict of interest, as I said, Samsung had notice of that well in advance. They can't keep that as an ace up their sleeve and only play it if the jury finds against them. Contrary to popular belief, trials don't work like they do on TV or in the movies: you
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From what I could tell, the jury foreman lied by omission when he was being questioned about his previous relationships with Samsung/Seagate. Regardless, he should have been outed by _someone_ as having a conflict of interest in the outcome as the holder of a dubious intellectual property patent.
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From what I could tell, the jury foreman lied by omission when he was being questioned about his previous relationships with Samsung/Seagate.
They only asked him about Samsung. It's not clear that he knew at the time that Seagate had been bought by Samsung... But on the other hand, Samsung should have been able to do a simple search through their files and say "hey, we sued this guy once... maybe we shouldn't have him on the jury?" Additionally, Samsung's lawyers should have done a simple records search to see if he had ever been in court before, since at the very least they'd want to know if he was a juror in a related trial, if he was involved
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They only asked him about Samsung
That's not correct. Samsung brought this up in their appeal.
In the jury selection Hogan failed to mention the seagate lawsuit, but rather deflected by citing a smaller lawsuit that wasn't actually brought to court. link to pdf of questioning [groklaw.net]
So should no one who's an inventor on a patent be involved in a patent trial?
You're right that we shou
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They only asked him about Samsung
That's not correct. Samsung brought this up in their appeal.
In the jury selection Hogan failed to mention the seagate lawsuit, but rather deflected by citing a smaller lawsuit that wasn't actually brought to court. link to pdf of questioning [groklaw.net]
Maybe I misunderstood your original statement... You said "From what I could tell, the jury foreman lied by omission when he was being questioned about his previous relationships with Samsung/Seagate." He was questioned about whether he had any relationships to the parties in the case, Samsung and Apple, which is what I thought you were referring to. He was never questioned about his relationship with Seagate. From the opinion [appleinsider.com] denying juror misconduct:
Despite [the Seagate/Samsung] relationship, counsel for Samsung did not ask Mr. Hogan about this relationship with Seagate, and did not seek to elicit any information about whether that relationship might influence Mr. Hogan’s view in any way.
He was also asked if he had been in any litigation, and
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Yes, I definitely should have phrased my first reply differently and checked the actual history, apologies for phrasing that was misleading from my intent.
I believe the crux of the issue is that Hogan _should_ have mentioned the prior lawsuits when questioned in voir dire. I don't blame the judge, and have mixed feelings about Samsung's culpability if Hogan withheld information after being explicitly asked. Kudos for the Boston Legal reference, I really liked that show.
Hogan's patent, in my admittedly ama
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Yes, I definitely should have phrased my first reply differently and checked the actual history, apologies for phrasing that was misleading from my intent.
I believe the crux of the issue is that Hogan _should_ have mentioned the prior lawsuits when questioned in voir dire. I don't blame the judge, and have mixed feelings about Samsung's culpability if Hogan withheld information after being explicitly asked. Kudos for the Boston Legal reference, I really liked that show.
No worries. Yeah, Hogan probably should have mentioned the prior lawsuits. The problem is that bit about Samsung's culpability... If they really and truly had no way of knowing about it, then they're not penalized and could have raised it and gotten a mistrial. For example, if Hogan had changed his name since that trial, particularly in another state, and so they couldn't just search for "Hogan" in their records and in the court records.
Basically, what it comes down to is that, if Samsung really didn't kno
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Apple? Google? (Score:1)
ROFL. What a fanboi dilemma.
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.
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If this is true, then sue the f*&k out of them. You will almost certainly make more from doing that than you ever will be working there 60 hours a week.
If it is really as pervasive as you say, there should be GOBS of evidence around to throw these jackasses under the bus.
Poor Fractured Atlas (Score:3, Insightful)
John Galt is a sociopath.
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> 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
John Galt is a sociopath.
John Galt is a fictional protagonist from Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, who would probably defend leisse fairre (sp?) cartel style intra-corporate collusion in cases such as this. Even if the 'exploited' class was say, of a specific race or gender etc, instead of high-tech workers here. The theory being that somehow in the big big ol picture, the system of self motivated parts would punish such non-optimal strategies. OTOH, Galt was somewhat conflicted, because despite being such an advocate, he basically c
Got a great tip here (Score:2)
Next time, vote independent or socialist.
No Poach Agreements suck (Score:5, Insightful)
No poach agreements are just another form of price fixing. While companies may be on friendly or less than friendly terms, as long as they are separate companies, they have no right to enter into price fixing agreements. These agreements keep wages below market rates. Someone who might earn $300,000 a year in a free market might only earn $250,000 because other companies won't make competing offers with their current offer.
While losing employees causes a lot of disruption to a company, potential loss of IP, etc. this is just part of the game. All monopolies and cartels can offer plausible sounding reasons why the "order" that they impose on the market is better than competition, but as a society we decided long ago that the free market works better. So it doesn't matter what other benefits these companies claim no-poach agreements have, they are still illegal price fixing.
The only exception I can think of is a prohibition on people who move from company A to company B, contacting their co-workers in company A, in their capacity as an employee of company B. This could be considered in improper use of that person's professional contacts at company A. However a recruiter using public information to contact an employee at another company should always be not only allowed, but encouraged.
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Companies call their unions contractors. (Score:2)
In addition, one can include temporary, contingent, casual, staffing firm, and any other form of labor that isn't a directly-hired FT employee.
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The only exception I can think of is a prohibition on people who move from company A to company B, contacting their co-workers in company A, in their capacity as an employee of company B. This could be considered in improper use of that person's professional contacts at company A.
I think I had to sign a non-recruitment agreement when I left a company in 1999. Think it was valid for 2 years. Not sure if it was valid or not, I just signed because I was young and didn't care.
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You don't want a manger who leaves, to recruit all his former employees into a new company. This can hurt the company losing the manager as they'll also lose the rest of the group with him.
At the same time the new company doesn't want some new manager to build his own loyal dynasty from day 1.
Ironically this kind of stuff happens all the time within a company.
Though restricting either case should be illegal.
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The only exception I can think of is a prohibition on people who move from company A to company B, contacting their co-workers in company A, in their capacity as an employee of company B. This could be considered in improper use of that person's professional contacts at company A.
Why?
social perception of "tech workers" (Score:1)
If recent political events have not impacted any of us enough to change to social perception of "tech workers" as they call us I don't know if anything ever will. If this is the thanks we get for collectively making it possible for our President to charge into a second term using sophisticated analytic techniques encompassing social media, dynamic data storage, and lightning quick responsiveness we should all feel completely bamboozled. All of the hours we spend contributing to the development cycles of the
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The whole problem with saying this is that everyone's full of shit. So full of shit in fact that there is nothing you will personally make more of in your live than feces.
Imagine if all the feces you personally excreted from the day you soiled your first diaper until the day you soil your last were collected and measured. The amount of shit you as an individual will have shot out into our world would exceed that of anything else you've ever produced. And that's true of every single one of us.
So I'm not s
IBM Employee Legal Services, Inc. (Score:2)
The system doesn't have to be like this, we can restructure the game to reward cooperative behavior between the parties using game theory. See my sight for details on a new ADR process that utilizes these insights. We're just getting started, donations and other assistance is appreciated.
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Austin, TX 78758-6420
Re:Class action lawsuits are a scam anyway (Score:5, Insightful)
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I assure that as soon as word got out, the companies changed their behavior. I'm in one of those companies. The CEO was a fucking idiot to put that in an email. I'm glad he's leaving.
Class action is the ONLY remedy (Score:5, Insightful)
Can Everyone just take them to small clams court? All IT workers from the companies in Small clames court = lots of money to be paid out and lot of lawyers if they want to defend all the law sues.
Class action is the ONLY remedy; permit me to illustrate my point.
Judge: So what are the damages you are asking for, sir?
Nerd: I want the difference between what I was making over the years I was employed at A and not B.
Judge: Based on the money B would have offer you, had they actually offered you a job?
Nerd: Yes.
Judge: Based on them wanting to hire you in the first place?
Nerd: Yes.
Judge: anything else I should know?
Nerd: I also want damages for emotional distress.
Judge: For all that time you spent at A instead of B?
Nerd: Yes.
Judge: Due to a practice which you were unaware of until just recently?
Nerd: I have retroactive emotional distress.
Judge: Dismissed. Next!
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No the point is a cash grab for the lawyers, the people in the class action lawsuit dontget anything, but the lawyers get another million to 10 million to buy yet another yacht or villa in colorado.
Lawyers love class action lawsuits, it can make a lawyer a multi millionaire quickly.
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to buy yet another yacht or villa in colorado.
Villas in Colorado? That would put them a long way from their yacht...
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If it's not their first yacht, they probably already have property near the ocean, thus a villa in Colorado might be useful for skiing or some such.
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to buy yet another yacht or villa in colorado.
Villas in Colorado? That would put them a long way from their yacht...
That's what the private jet is for.
GP post is right - typical class action lawsuit:
1. Lawyers get millions.
2. Consumers get coupon for $5 off their NEXT purchase of the bad company's product.
You'd think lawyers make all the damn laws and are always the damn judges.
First thing we do, kill all the lawyers. Yeah, I know what Shakespeare meant. But that was a long time ago. Meanings change.
Q: What do you call 10,000 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?
A: A good start.
Q: What do you call a busload of lawy
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Which is that the class action lawsuit does its good by punishing the company with a huge-ass combined fine, thus forcing them to alter their behaviour.
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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.
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Yeah, anyone that thinks a lawyer is taking a "risk" witha Class action lawsuit is a complete and utter moron that is measured only on epic scales.
Please give me the list of lawyers that lost everything they had and are now destitute due to a failed class action lawsuit.
They only take them on if they are a "sure thing". Sounds like you are simply spewing "stupid Uberbah Bullshit"....
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Sounds like you're butthurt that your winger fuckwittery was just destroyed.
Please tell me who pays for the cost of dozens of staffers, expert witnesses, and court costs if the class action lawyers lose the case. Please tell me how much of share of the pie you would want for a job where you assume all of the risk, where e
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So what is the alternative? In most class action lawsuits the damages to each plaintiff are small. So they have the choice of either joining the class and getting a few bucks (let's say X bucks), or suing on their own and getting 2*X, but having to pay their lawyers 100*X.
Sure class action lawyers rip of their clients, but let's try to fix that, instead of fighting against the whole concept of class action. A good first step could be requiring the lawyers to be paid in the same manner as their clients - if
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Re:Class action lawsuits are a scam anyway (Score:5, Insightful)
The trouble is(that while class actions do generally pay the lawyers too much and the class too little) the alternative to a class action is generally inaction, which pays the class nothing and doesn't even cost the malefactor money.
The 'transaction costs', so to speak, of taking something to court are high. Doubly so(if you are lucky, could be substantially more than doubly) if you are going up against a deep-pocketed foe who really doesn't want adverse precedent or inconvenient discovery to take place. For anything outside of the most trivial cases, this means that your right to individual redress in civil court is mostly theoretical.
What I find most odd about the denial of 'class' status in this case is that an illegal cartel arrangement to push down wages is exactly the sort of situation where it would be very difficult for any specific employee(unless they are allowed to take their case to discovery and dig up a bunch of juicy internal documents mentioning them by name) to prove any specific salary delta between the competitive and noncompetitive situations; but it should be relatively simple(by economic modeling standards) to arrive at an approximate figure for overall savings on wages by the cartel members. And, while precisely allocating the unpaid hypothetical wages to the people who lost them would be gravy, just getting to the point where the malefactors are punished would at least have deterrent value, and hopefully make such agreements less common elsewhere and in the future.
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or a Guild
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What I find most odd about the denial of 'class' status in this case is that an illegal cartel arrangement to push down wages is exactly the sort of situation where it would be very difficult for any specific employee(unless they are allowed to take their case to discovery and dig up a bunch of juicy internal documents mentioning them by name) to prove any specific salary delta between the competitive and noncompetitive situations; but it should be relatively simple(by economic modeling standards) to arrive at an approximate figure for overall savings on wages by the cartel members.
They learned their lesson from the Vioxx lawsuit.
Suppose there is a 10% chance that any individual was cheated. If you just divide that evenly across the pool then everybody gets thousands of dollars. If you instead litigate everything one case at a time then there is a 90% chance that any particular plaintiff was not cheated, and therefore the juries rule against every single one of them. The result is that nobody bothers to pursue a claim, especially after a few people lose.
Class action lawsuits are pr
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Honestly(while the rulings in class action cases tend to be ridiculously likely to allow offenders to pay in coupons, software, and other 'in-kind' nonsense that costs them pennies on the dollar), it would probably be better if people thought of class action suits as something more like a criminal proceeding, except handled by private sector actors based on financial incentives.
When a criminal case comes up, the first zillion comments aren't "The criminal justice system is a total scam: the prosecutor gets