The long-running employee-poaching lawsuit involving Silicon Valley’s biggest tech companies is coming to a close.
In the class-action antitrust suit, employees had accused Apple, Google, Intel, and Adobe of conspiring to keep engineer wages down by agreeing not to poach each other's workers. This past August, U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh rejected the proposed settlement of $324.5 million as too low, ruling that any reappraised figure would have to be at least $380 million. Then, on Tuesday night, Reuters reported that the companies had agreed on a new settlement, and the New York Times followed up with a report that said the settlement figure had risen to $415 million, citing "a source close to the negotiations."
The case---which dates all the way back to 2005---was largely built on top of evidence that former Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Google’s Eric Schmidt had personally exchanged emails about the poaching of an Apple engineer, among other informal agreements between the Valley’s biggest firms. Allegedly, companies kept “do not poach” lists as part of the collusion.
Even with the addition of another $90 million, the revised settlement is no sweat off the backs of these large tech companies, which will end up paying out only a few thousand dollars to each of the 64,000 plaintiffs after lawyers take their 25 percent cut.
