Judge OKs $415M no-poaching payout to Apple, Google employees

arstechnica.com

17 pointsbradleyjg4 comments

Divided by the 64,000 employees who are suing, the company is really paying nothing. There doesn't seem to be any punitive fine. Where is the deterrent to stop companies from forming non-poaching agreements in the future?

I strongly agree. This is a rounding error for these companies. I'd like to see each of them pay $10 billion. That's an amount big enough for the directors and shareholders to notice.

I'm not saying that the employees who were discriminated against should get that much. The money could go to charity, could go to the government, could be lit in a big bonfire.

It just should be a large enough amount that everyone involved would say to themselves, over and over: "what we did was really stupid, we won't do that again".

Whenever a corporation gets caught breaking the law, the penalty has to be greater than the amount they saved by breaking the law. Otherwise, why bother following the law?

This settlement fails that test.

"Hey guys, here's this payout for this lawsuit. In other news, there won't be any raises this year."

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