Apple, Google, others agree to $324.5 million settlement in wage case

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-fi-tn-apple-google-conspiracy-20140523-story.html

By ROBERT FATURECHI
May 23, 2014

e dollar amount is now on the record. Apple, Google and other tech giants accused of artificially suppressing wages by conspiring not to poach each other's talent have agreed to settle a lawsuit filed by their employees for $324.5 million.

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It still needs to be approved by U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose. If she does, there will surely be grumbling among tech employees who have publicly complained that Apple, Google, Intel Corp. and Adobe Systems Inc. would be losing just a fraction of the $3 billion they allegedly saved by suppressing wages.

Each class member is estimated to get a few thousand dollars.

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The lawsuit, filed on behalf of more than 64,000 technical employees, claimed that Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe Systems had a pact not to recruit one another's workers. That alleged conspiracy, spanning four years from 2005 to 2009, kept salaries down, the employees said.

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If the documents that have surfaced publicly are any indication, the trial would have caused serious embarrassment for the four tech giants. In a 2007 internal email that has already gone public, the chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt, emailed then-Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs to let him know that his company was going to fire a recruiter who tried to poach an Apple employee.

Upon hearing the news of the lowly recruiter's imminent termination, Jobs expressed his reaction with a smiley face: ":)"

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The lawsuit has shed light on other embarrassing exchanges. Google co-founder Sergey Brin, for example, sent a message to other officials at the company to alert them that Jobs was upset about their recruiting of Apple talent. He recalled Jobs telling him, "If you hire a single one of these people, that means war," according to the email.

Jobs was assured that a Google executive got personally involved "and firmly stopped all efforts to recruit anyone from Apple."

Their alleged conspiracy, however, faltered in part because executives at Facebook were reluctant to join. In a deposition, Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, who herself left Google for Facebook, said she refused to stop poaching talent: "I declined at that time to limit Facebook's recruitment or hiring of Google employees."