{"id":2716,"date":"2014-04-03T22:49:56","date_gmt":"2014-04-03T22:49:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ncjolt.org\/?p=2716"},"modified":"2020-06-04T20:53:43","modified_gmt":"2020-06-04T20:53:43","slug":"show-me-the-money-technology-companies-face-class-action-suit-over-wage-fixing-scandal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/blogs\/show-me-the-money-technology-companies-face-class-action-suit-over-wage-fixing-scandal\/","title":{"rendered":"Show Me the Money: Technology Companies Face Class-Action Suit over Wage-Fixing Scandal"},"content":{"rendered":"

Several technology giants, including Apple and Google have lost a hearing which will now allow thousands of technology workers to come together as a group to sue the companies for wages lost as result of a wage-fixing scandal. The scandal was revealed by Silicon Valley website, Pando Daily<\/i>,<\/a> after they obtained internal memos from Google and Apple; these memos illustrate an agreement made between Steve Jobs of Apple and Erich Schmidt of Google to \u201cfix\u201d the labor market for technology workers. This initial cartel agreement expanded to include many other technology companies over the years, including Dell, IBM, eBay, Microsoft, Comcast, Clear Channel, Dreamworks, and WPP, among others. The projected number of employees who have been affected by the wage-fixing agreements currently falls around one million.\u00a0 A Department of Justice investigation has already been initiated regarding the illegal agreement following the first article released by Pando Daily on the subject, and had resulted in a settlement for seven technology companies premised on their agreement to limit the restricting nature of their hiring deals. However, following this settlement, the companies were served with a civil lawsuit from the employees who had been affected by the wage-fixing agreements.
\nThe agreements between the technology companies became illegal due their secret nature and their objective to fix wages in the labor market in the face of decreased profits due to rapidly increasing technology engineer salaries. \u00a0The agreements contained the \u201cdo\u2019s and don\u2019ts of hiring\u201d in addition to a promise to share information including hiring policies and wage information; the objective of this shared information was to repress the growth of salaries in the tech industry. \u00a0As more companies entered into the agreement, a process formed on the basis of a \u201ctit-for-tat type of recruiting threat\u201d \u2013 by refusing to ease off in recruitment of foremost hiring candidates, a company would essentially leave itself vulnerable to be poached for its employees by fellow companies within the agreement.<\/p>\n

‘If you hire a single one of these people, this means war.’<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Though many of the companies claimed that the identical non-solicitation policies were merely an unknowing coincidence, the evidence of several memos and e-mails has revealed otherwise. An illustration<\/a> of the tit-for-tat mentality of the CEO\u2019s of these technology giants is an e-mail sent from Steve Jobs to Sergey Brin of Apple which stated: \u201cIf you hire a single one of these people, this means war.\u201d \u2013 this was in response to Google\u2019s attempts to win one of Apple\u2019s employees back to their company. What even further illustrates the workings of this strategy was the subsequent internal memo circulated by Apple which instructed to that Google was to be added a \u201chands-off list\u201d due to their new agreement not to recruit against one another.
\nSince these secret wage-fixing agreements have been exposed, many of the accused companies have made efforts to settle out of court. Despite these efforts, 60,000 technology employees in Silicon Valley have won the right to bring action against the companies, including a civil class-action suit<\/a> that will commence on May 27th<\/sup> of this year. \u00a0If the class-action suit were to prove successful for the plaintiffs, the damages to be owed could total up to nine billion dollars. While there are concerns over the impact that rivalries between CEOs may have impacted technology development and progress in Silicon Valley, there is also the issue of this being a case \u201cwhere well compensated workers are going to get more money\u201d when compared to wage actions suits for those who are not even paid minimum wage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Several technology giants, including Apple and Google have lost a hearing which will now allow thousands of technology workers to come together as a group to sue the companies for wages lost as result of a wage-fixing scandal. The scandal was revealed by Silicon Valley website, Pando Daily, after they obtained internal memos from Google …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[51],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2716"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2716"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2716\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7473,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2716\/revisions\/7473"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}