Bigger Settlement Said to Be Reached in Silicon Valley Antitrust Case
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
In this case, there were a number of challenges. The first of which was that the DOJ settled with a slap on the wrist.[1] That's a very strong signal to both the court and jurors that the claims aren't a slam-dunk. Second, remember that in a civil case you don't just have to prove that the defendant did something wrong. You have to prove every element of the often multi-facted claim. Finally, there's a lot of back-and-forth with experts. Defendants can afford to hire the world's leading economists to say that the damages were less than claimed. Plaintiffs will have experts, but they're unlikely to be able to front the money for them to do as thorough a job.
$412 million would be over 10% the plaintiffs' experts estimated damages of $3 billion. That's not an atypical recovery in a class action settlement.
[1] Contrast this to the LCD price fixing cases, where the DOJ's levying $500+ million in fines resulted in big civil settlements.
And then, the economic benefits of talent-outside-the-giants flowed (via early-employee equity) to many of the same people who "lost out" on big-company salary-bidding wars.
The effects of such collusion on "the entire market" are thus pretty murky. If you've worked with any ex-Apple, ex-Google, etc people – you may already have been a net-beneficiary!
It's only the people who stayed put, at one of the cartel companies through the whole era, who have a strong case for estimatable monetary damages.
Also, if their base salary were higher elsewhere they could likely demanded even more equity. So even if you're assuming the equity isn't worthless, they potentially could have gotten more if salaries were higher.
But if the employees were truly worth more – they produced more in value – then as long as new companies were free to start (some indeed started by those same ex-cartel employees themselves), then someone would pay that full value.
And if, with hundreds or thousands of potential employers, almost all outside the cartel, the salaries were still what they were... then what's the proof employees were worth more, anyway?
If there's some purchasable commodity that can generate $X in value, then a competitive market will tend to offer up to ($X - epsilon) for that commodity. Even if a cartel of a few of the biggest purchasers A, B, and C coordinate such that they'll only pay (0.90 * $X), the existence of dozens or hundreds or even thousands of other self-motivated bidders mean the commodity is still going to go for ($X - epsilon).
The same goes for skilled labor. The A, B, and C cartel may be driving down their short-term compensation costs a little, but by incrementally letting talent that's more productive go elsewhere, that talent and the economy is still doing just fine.
In fact, probably more so. It's difficult to move job as an H1B holder due to the legal requirement to have the same job role. The only places fulfilling this would very likely be between these companies, which would have been suppressed.