Judge OKs class-action suit against Apple, Intel, Google, Adobe
mercurynews.com
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Now, before the usual tropes about the software industry's meritocracy and rugged individualism lead everyone to laugh at the idea of a labor movement for software engineers, let's all just take a moment and have a look at what happened to the Hollywood visual effects industry. It is one of the very few parts of the movie production process that is not unionized. Because of this lack of protection, studio execs openly brag about putting them out of business as a normal part of making movies (see the quote "If I don’t put a visual effects shop out of business (on my movie), I’m not doing my job." in the first link below):
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117965871.html
http://www.npr.org/2013/03/19/174703202/visual-effects-firms...
http://www.visualeffectssociety.com/node/2425
Something similar could quite easily happen to the software industry. Now is a perfect time to start a labor movement, as the settlement and pending class action suit clearly show the need for such a thing.
EDIT: Just to be clear, the reason for the comparison with the VFX industry is that it is a solid example of a bunch of technocrats who had a chance to unionize but didn't, and now they are being ground into the dust. The exact same thing could easily happen to the typical Silicon Valley programmer. This case with Apple, Intel, Google, and Adobe shows that they are already trying.
The American VFX firms, being squeezed between unions and foreign competition suddenly will start winning contracts that they could not get because their costs were too high even without union?
Notice the quote you mentioned is not about putting some artist out of job, it's putting an entire shop out of business. How is a union going to prevent this?
In my dilettante view (I work in games and we rely on VFX even more than films) - if American VFX shops had unionized staff there had not been any American VFX shops by now.
Their situations are still pretty different though, and any new union action always has the looming hammer of the federal government threatening to shut it down.
What is the Union issue here? If your product is freeloading on the back of another well you should make sure you have more than one source of income.
This is like complaining that Google has moved into my area and is eating my lunch for example flight or hotel bookings
Movies these days are just bits, most of the time any work done overseas is just transferred back to LA over the internet. The same with software, any company can hire programmers overseas and just import the source code (git clone) and how is any govt supposed to tax that?
http://vfxsoldier.wordpress.com/2013/07/11/legal-recommendat...
The whole point of an union* is to give the participants the option to fight against such problems they couldn't solve alone, because "together we are strong" - "so, you don't give me an contract, because I did use my rights? Congratulations, you are now part of the unions black list, i.e. no more work from our industry for your studio. Good luck making your films without VFX."
> The same with software, any company can hire programmers overseas and just import the source code (git clone) and how is any govt supposed to tax that?
How do we manage to check copyright violations? Yeah, badly, I know. But that is just a variant of this problem, so it is solvable, but not easy. For movies, it is easy: Force the companies to declare exactly where which part of a movie was produced and tax accordingly.
* Note: I have no idea if an union would really be a good idea. The unions I know of are .. less than perfect. This is all just "in theory it would be ..."
Some times Unions and Employers act together for everyones interest eg Broad band rollout in the UK (prospect and CWU) and the the new nuclear build (prospect) are two I am familiar with.
In South America many countries tax imported professional services (including the outsourcing of source code development) - the way they monitor those types of activities is by tracking all outgoing payments from the country - if you can't pay your service provider, you can't get the service provided.
Therefore the government forces you to report what services you are importing in order to pay for them, and in doing so makes them taxable.
> The allegations prompted an investigation in 2009 by the U.S. Department of Justice to determine if the companies had violated the Sherman Antitrust Act. A year later, the agency announced a settlement in which the companies acknowledged having had agreements to not "cold-call" employees at certain firms. They agreed to refrain from such no-poaching-pacts for five years, but the deal provided no compensation for their employees.
This new case is a civil class action on the same issue.
If they did the usual "we are not admitting we broke the law but will settle anyway to make this go away" then the DoJ had a duty to make it clear that they did break the law.
Otherwise after 5 years some other shmuck is going to have to go after them again when they start doing it again.
It is like the DoJ just washed their hands of the whole thing. (Let the proles deal with it.)
Basically, this means that it was profitable for the companies to collude.
8% of 64,000 is about 5000 employees. $20 million is $4000 per employee. That's in all probability significantly less than the annual salary bump that a typical employee in the class would be likely to negotiate.
So the companies not only reduced their costs in the first year, they reduced it in subsequent years and avoided compounding the costs via raises and via subsequent negotiations with employees whose salaries would have been higher due to previous negotiations and compounding with raises.
But on the bright side, at least the attorneys got paid.
The attorneys probably took 40% of the $20 million, so the actual employees affected only got $2,400, which is a really bad deal. I'm surprised the class voted to accept that settlement.
Automatically tripled?! Wow. Good on the legal system, and you would think this knowledge would've prevented this sort of scheme, but they either didn't know or didn't care.
They /agreed/ to these terms in advance as far as I'm aware, who are you to tell the other employees(who didn't complain) that their contract should've been avoided?
Also, the reason it's a federal case, this "agreement" was done amongst the employers without the consent of the employees. If it were not California, and there actually was a non-compete in their contracts then you may have had a point.
There's a major difference between you agreeing to not compete and your employer actively preventing you from obtaining alternative employment.