US judge: no class action against tech giants' 'wage-control pact' A US judge is refusing to allow tech employees to band together and sue Apple, Google, and other tech firms in a class-action suit over those companies' alleged "no-hire pact" to keep wages down. District Judge Lucy Koh said that the pact affected workers in too many different ways to allow them to be lumped together, and …
In the USA, an individual is certainly allowed to simultaneously present his record for employment at multiple places. IF you sign a 'no compete clause', then you surrender that right (for a price).
The USA antitrust laws would seemingly cause commercial companies to not-enter into such collusion without appropriate 'no compete clause' agreements.
In the USA, this kind of tort can take several forms. The accusers choose the tort-style that best fits their proof. The number of people damaged and the aggregate size of the provable damage is critical to success.
Class action is very powerful (although Bush ameliorated it in 2005), but the level of proof is high for maximal result.
Other kinds of individual actions can be started at a lower level. If they are effective, then the corporations BEG for a class action to limit their total damage.
The USA has PLENTY of attorneys that can gauge the optimal level to get these off-the-ground. If no one does take it, then the proof is likely not strong enough.
"Other kinds of individual actions can be started at a lower level. If they are effective, then the corporations BEG for a class action to limit their total damage."
The idea of "death through 1000 paper cuts" is still a good one for particular classes of offenders - such as junkfaxers, etc.
Whatever did happen to fax.com ?
If its too varied to be just one class, then its too varied. Only the judge can make that determination. The Solution is to get each different group of "injured" employees together and make classes out of all of them if they number greater than about 15.
It may have been that alone there was no group large enough to grant class status to and therefore a class action would have been picked apart by the opposing attorneys.
Its also never a good sign when the supposed class will not comply with legal procedure during the discovery process, going so far as to telling a court that they wont comply. Seeking the court's assistance on their terms is a surefire way to piss off a judge if you're not playing by the rules the judge lays down in the initial hearings, and from a cursory reading of the article it seems like Koh wasn't prepared to play ball like that. If I was her, I would have probably gone even further and leveled contempt charges.
Plus, given that she's used to dealing with the legally grey to black dealings of the likes of Samsung, Apple, Oracle, AT&T, Advance-Newhouse, and Cisco I can't say I'm very surprised that if something doesn't seem right to her, or seems likely to create a major appellate problem later that she'll toss it out of her court room.
Its also rather surprising that the plaintiffs didn't shop for a different jurisdiction. I personally would have picked Middle Florida if Oracle was involved at all, or in Eastern Illinois if IBM was involved.
"facially anticompetive"? Where "facially" is "with respect to the face"? Or did they actually mean to say "superficially"?
Or perhaps "farcically"?
Means "obvious or apparent without profound analysis".
I assumed that was what they meant . Essentially an English version of prima facie - without an explicit translation of "prima", but in context that can be assumed. It's a metaphorical signifier of surface versus depth.
I thought law was about the *crime* not the myriad effects. If this "logic" is true, how can we prosecute for things like assault when there are too many victims affected in "too many" ways? Could be beaten, could be stabbed, could be long term/short term damage, etc.
Methinks this is good case for "follow the money". All these companies contribute significant funds towards the political machine, who make the laws that then, somehow, seem to let these companies off the hook.
there's no difference, in the end, between banks and tech companies other than scale, it seems.
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