Wage Theft Class Action Against Tech Giants Will Continue

Top Class Actions’s website and social media posts use affiliate links. If you make a purchase using such links, we may receive a commission, but it will not result in any additional charges to you. Please review our Affiliate Link Disclosure for more information.

Class action lawsuit says tech companies made a secret agreement to not recruit each others’ employees, leading to suppressed wages for millions of tech workers.

Employees working for Apple Inc., Google Inc. and other major tech companies will be allowed to continue their class action lawsuit, alleging that there was an agreement between the heads of the companies not to hire each others’ employees in order to keep wages down artificially.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has denied the request by executives at Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe to dismiss the class action lawsuit against the tech giants, who allegedly conspired together not to recruit staff from each others’ companies.

The judge presiding over the case is U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh, who had certified the case as a class action lawsuit. Koh had previously denied class certification to the plaintiffs, but granted leave for them to file an appeal, which was later successful.

The plaintiffs cited emails between executives at Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe, Intuit and Pixar that they claim proved that there was a sort of “gentleman’s agreement” to not hire from each other’s staff.

Judge Koh unsealed those emails on Jan. 21. The emails that are part of this wage and hour lawsuit were originally part of an antitrust investigation that was performed by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2010.

In February 2005, Apple board member Bill Campbell, who also worked as a senior adviser to Google, sent an email to Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who died in 2011, confirming that Google’s Eric Schmidt “got directly involved and firmly stopped all efforts to recruit anyone from Apple.”

Schmidt reportedly told Shona Brown, Senior Vice President for Business Operation at Google, later in that year, that the agreement needed to remain a secret and it should only be discussed “verbally, since I don’t want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later?”

There is also reportedly an email exchange between Jobs and Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen, after word got to the Apple CEO that Adobe was trying to recruit some of Apple’s employees. Chizen said he thought the agreement to not recruit from each other’s companies only referred to senior staff.

“I thought we agreed not to recruit any senior level employees … I would propose we keep it that way. Open to discuss. It would be good to agree,” Chizen wrote.

Jobs responded, “OK, I’ll tell our recruiters they are free to approach any Adobe employee who is not a Sr. Director or VP. Am I understanding your position correctly?”

The threat caused the Adobe CEO to back down.

“I’d rather NOT to actively solicit any employee from either company…. If you are in agreement, I will let my folks know,” he said.

Chizen sent an email to the vice president of human resources at Adobe the next day telling him that “we are not to solicit ANY Apple employees, and vise versa.”

“If I tell Steve [Jobs] it’s open season (other than senior managers), he will deliberately poach Adobe just to prove a point,” Chizen said. “Knowing Steve, he will go after some of our top Mac talent … and he will do it in a way in which they will be enticed to come (extraordinary packages and Steve wooing).”

Jobs also reportedly threatened Google founder Sergey Brin to keep away from Apple’s Safari programers.

“If you [Brin] hire a single one of these people that means war.”

According to the wage theft lawsuit, it was a practice that began in 1986 between Lucasfilm and Pixar.

“George Lucas believed that companies should not compete against each other for employees, because ‘[i]t’s not normal industrial competitive situation.’ As George Lucas explained, ‘I always — the rule we had, or the rule that I put down for everybody,’ was that ‘we cannot get into a bidding war with other companies because we don’t have the margins for that sort of thing,'” the lawsuit cites.

The wage theft trial against the tech companies is set to begin in May 27 in San Jose, Calif.

The class action lawsuit could affect 100,000 employees and could cost the companies about $9 billion.

The Tech Worker Anti-Poaching Class Action Lawsuit case is In re: High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation, Case No. 11-cv-02509, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California.

UPDATE: Google, Apple, Intel, and Adobe reached a class action settlement agreement on April 24, 2014.

If you or someone you know did not receive all the money they earned, legal options are available to you. Learn more and get a free consultation regarding a claims eligibility at the Wage & Hour Unpaid Overtime Class Action Lawsuit Investigation. Experienced legal professionals are able to determine if you have a case. You could receive back pay as well as penalties. Don’t delay — the statute of limitations under the Fair Labor Standards Act is two to three years, depending on the state, so act now.

UPDATE: The high-tech employee class action settlement has paid out! Checks were mailed the week of December 21, 2015. If you received a check, let us know in the comments. Congrats to everyone who got paid!