Judge Nixes Silicon Valley Wage-Fixing Settlement As Inadequate

The proposed settlement in the Silicon Valley wage-fixing case has been rejected by a federal judge as inadequate, given plaintiffs’ substantial and compelling evidence. Judge Lucy Koh of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California called the proposed $324 million agreement “troubling,” considering the amount of evidence that Apple, Google, Adobe and other firms entered into an agreement not to poach each others’s employees, artificially suppressing compensation for more than 60,000 tech workers. The proposed settlement “falls below the range of reasonableness,” Judge Koh said, and any agreement would need to be at least $380 million. The workers originally had planned to seek $3 billion in damages, which would have been tripled to $9 billion under antitrust law.