A plaintiff in a lawsuit that accuses firms including Apple Inc and Google Inc of conspiring to hold down salaries has asked a US court to reject a US$324 million settlement.
Michael Devine, one of the four named plaintiffs in a class action of 64,000 people, described the tentative settlement as “grossly inadequate” in a letter to the judge in the case.
The offer is about one-tenth of experts’ estimates of potential damages and lacks any penalty, he said.
“The class wants a chance at real justice,” Devine wrote to US Judge Lucy Koh on Sunday. “We want our day in court.”
Tech workers filed the lawsuit against Apple, Google, Intel Inc and Adobe Systems Inc in 2011, alleging they conspired to refrain from soliciting one another’s employees to avert a salary war.
The workers planned to ask for US$3 billion in damages at a trial set to begin at the end of this month, court filings said. That could triple to US$9 billion under US antitrust law.
“As an analogy,” Devine wrote, “if a shoplifter is caught on video stealing a US$400 iPad from the Apple Store, would a fair and just resolution be for the shoplifter to pay Apple US$40, keep the iPad, and walk away with no record or admission of wrongdoing? Of course not.”
The case has been closely watched due to the potentially high damages and the chance to explore Silicon Valley’s elite. The case is based largely on e-mails in which Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and some of their rivals allegedly planned to avoid poaching each other’s prized engineers.
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