A California judge this week signaled that she was willing to approve a $415 million offer to settle a class action lawsuit brought against some of Silicon Valley’s largest companies for collusion to suppress the wages of tech workers.
Google, Apple, and other companies are accused of cheating some 60,000-plus workers out of more than $9 billion in wages between 2004 and 2009 by agreeing to “anti-poaching” pacts to prevent companies from competing for workers, which are illegal under U.S. antitrust law.
Court documents show that Apple founder, the late Steve Jobs, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, and other top-level executives negotiating over email on agreements to not recruit each others’ employees.
The collusion to suppress the wages of tech workers was first flagged in 2010, when the Justice Department reached an agreement with six tech giants, four of which are in Tuesday’s settlement, to halt anti-competitive activities.
However, the efforts to drive down the salaries of Silicon Valley engineers are far from over, and the industry has only ramped up efforts in recent years to suppress the wages of workers through other means.
One narrative generated by tech lobbyists is that the tech industry has long suffered from a dire shortage of talent, and that immigration programs that recruit tech workers from overseas were due to expansion.
“Why do we offer so few H-1B visas for talented specialists that the supply runs out within days of becoming available each year, even though we know each of these jobs will create two or three more American jobs in return?” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in 2013.
That year, Zuckerberg and other top tech executives founded FWD.us, an advocacy group focused on immigration reform. It was quickly able to raise more than $50 million for lobbying efforts, and bought television ads promoting pro-immigration candidates in the run-up to the 2014 midterm elections.
