Judge: $324M Settlement In Silicon Valley Tech Worker Case Not Enough

itwbennett writes: "A proposed $324.5 million settlement of claims that Silicon Valley companies (Adobe, Apple, Google, and Intel) suppressed worker wages by agreeing not to hire each others' employees may not be high enough, a judge signaled on Thursday. Judge Lucy Koh didn't say whether she would approve the settlement, but she did say in court that she was worried about whether that amount was fair to the roughly 64,000 technology workers represented in the case. Throughout Thursday's hearing, she questioned not just the amount but the logic behind the settlement as presented by lawyers for both the plaintiffs and the defendants."

Re:$507.03

[Etherwalk]

$324.5 million / 64000 workers = $507.03

These tech workers are getting fuck either way.

$5070. It almost certainly isn't enough to make the engineers whole, but it is more than nothing and not completely unrespectable. (They didn't lose their entire salary, but did lose some money.)

It is a *settlement* proposal, though. It's not supposed to be enough to make them whole--just more reasonable for both sides than fighting.

Re:Holy shit, seriously?

[bluefoxlucid]

I remember her consistently applying judiciary favoritism, e.g. allowing a plaintiff to introduce late evidence all the damn time but denying defense evidence because it wasn't declared in discovery.

Re:More

[Cabriel]

Given that $324 million for 64 000 employees means just a hair over $5000 per person, I'd have to say the judgement should have been closer to $3 Billion. Or, if you really want to talk punitive, $32 Billion.

Re:Misleading summary

[Walking The Walk]

It isn't as if another version was already submitted earlier, perhaps with a better summary for the editors to use:

http://slashdot.org/submission... [slashdot.org]

The accepted story was submitted by itwbennett [slashdot.org], and links to a story on itworld.com. I think it's a fair assumption that it was submitted by Amy Bennett [itworld.com], ITworld's Managing Editor. According to her achievements, she's had 2^9 submissions accepted, from which we can conclude that Slashdot editors probably prioritize her submissions. I imagine her submissions are fairly well written, link to a somewhat reputable source, and have already been deemed interesting enough to the IT crowd for a story on ITworld. So they get fast-tracked, and other worthy submissions are reviewed later, deemed to be duplicates, and discarded.

Would be nice if her submissions lead off with the fact that she was the managing editor for ITworld though, just to make it clear that she's just trying to feed traffic to her own site. (Which is a valid action if the story is original and interesting, but should require a disclaimer.)