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Civil Suit Against Google, Apple and Others Over Employee-Poaching Ban Can Continue
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Yes but when there is so many people looking for a job or a better job employers just choose the ones who fall into line and ask for the least wages.
That was my question as well. It was my understanding that the deal was that these companies wouldn't call employees to try to get them to leave where they were, but if the employee applied on their own there was no issue.
Non-competes have been around for decades.
The end result will have to be a compromise by companies and prospective employees who job hop to push up their salaries every 6 months and how their actions logically bring concern by the corporations that they end up brining IP knowledge that is under NDA to their competitors.
A competitive review process will have to be implemente by corporations as a means to reduce defections.
Actually you can. California is Work at Will and any contract for a period of employment is not enforceable. What these companies were doing is trying to keep the salary base, thus overhead cost and thus real-estate cost down.
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Non-compete agreements are not enforceable in California. Many say that is what has spurred the growth here. Instead of protecting politically connected and incompetent managers, the state protects smart and able professionals.
Job-hopping is good for the individual. Fortune favors the brave. If you think job hoppers are something, try the independent contractors that make more than most executives!
There is. It's called competition. You pay your employees enough to keep them from going to the competition. The free market cuts both ways.
To be fair, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates shouldn't have been allowed to come into contact with each other then...
No, the deal was also about employees applying to other companies.
Example, you work at Google and apply for a job at Apple, Apple would not hire you and they would call Google and tell that employee X is applying for a job.
Good coverage here:
http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/27/2...edacted-steve-jobs-eric-schmidt-paul-otellini
retraint of trade
I dunno about the US, but in the UK that is mad illegal!
These are not contractors, they are employees with employee rights. Its illegal to artificially block the employment of anyone. Having an NDA does not mean you cant work for somoeone else it just means that if you share a secret you can be sued.
In an area like Silicon Valley where there will be a limited amount of companies that want your specific skills it is so "anti-employee" to limit there choices by a "gentlemen's agreement". What if the employee falls out with his line manager? Or his company does something unethical that he doesnt agree with. They are now banned from seeking meaningful employment elsewhere?
If you want to impose these things, use contractors not employees and pay ridiculous money for them to compensate for the "lock in". Dont use normal employees and break the law to benefit your fat cat executive salaries.
(btw, if your company policy is not to cold call directly staff under contract in other companies then you can be sacked, thats fine. But if a job is in the paper or online and an employee applies, his current employer should not prejudice his application, being that the employee has initiated the application)
I dunno about the US, but in the UK that is mad illegal!
These are not contractors, they are employees with employee rights. Its illegal to artificially block the employment of anyone. Having an NDA does not mean you cant work for somoeone else it just means that if you share a secret you can be sued.
In an area like Silicon Valley where there will be a limited amount of companies that want your specific skills it is so "anti-employee" to limit there choices by a "gentlemen's agreement". What if the employee falls out with his line manager? Or his company does something unethical that he doesnt agree with. They are now banned from seeking meaningful employment elsewhere?
If you want to impose these things, use contractors not employees and pay ridiculous money for them to compensate for the "lock in". Dont use normal employees and break the law to benefit your fat cat executive salaries.
(btw, if your company policy is not to cold call directly staff under contract in other companies then you can be sacked, thats fine. But if a job is in the paper or online and an employee applies, his current employer should not prejudice his application, being that the employee has initiated the application)
Or get another job in another field until you can switch back to your field?
Probably not possible to think that way in this perfect world.
Not insinuating the collusion is acceptable, but if you got the tide up to your lips it's time to swim into any direction
From what I've read, this wasn't an agreement not to hire qualified applicants from the other companies involved. This was an agreement not to ACTIVELY seek out and recruit employees of the other companies. The employees were ALWAYS FREE to apply for positions at any of the other companies, and they were always free to BE HIRED by them.
seems like Freedom is more restricted in the US nowadays
anyway, the guy will get big bucks if the class action wins
anyway, the guy will get big bucks if the class action wins
Methinks someone didn't read the article. This is not about non-compete agreements (preventing someone from seeking another job in the same field), which have been upheld as legal. This is about not poaching another company's employees, as in calling up an engineer who works at Google and offering them a better salary to come work for Apple. If that same employee applied for a job at Apple, they could be hired without issue, but Apple agreed not to be the one to initiate the process (and vice-versa, between these companies). I see no problem with this.
jW
It's time for Apple to ramp up its ethics.
First stop having its products produced under near-slave labor conditions by Foxconn.
Then stop stomping on its employees' human rights in order to keep them cheaper.
What is so pervert about Apple's behavior: even at time of historic level profit levels, the corporation tries to cheat on the people who do the work for them, causing them a lot of harm.
If Apple doesn't stop it, it will one day catch up with it.
One day there will be an online video be going viral that shows a slave doing slave labor on a cotton plantation, and then seamlessly transit into a ant style almost-slave laborer putting together iPhones and barely making enough to live, not having an apartment, and sleeping in dormitories.
Once a company has gotten a bad reputation, it will take a deep hit in the numbers.
So, hopefully, Apple will get its act together so its ethics will be as good as its computers and phones.
First stop having its products produced under near-slave labor conditions by Foxconn.
Then stop stomping on its employees' human rights in order to keep them cheaper.
What is so pervert about Apple's behavior: even at time of historic level profit levels, the corporation tries to cheat on the people who do the work for them, causing them a lot of harm.
If Apple doesn't stop it, it will one day catch up with it.
One day there will be an online video be going viral that shows a slave doing slave labor on a cotton plantation, and then seamlessly transit into a ant style almost-slave laborer putting together iPhones and barely making enough to live, not having an apartment, and sleeping in dormitories.
Once a company has gotten a bad reputation, it will take a deep hit in the numbers.
So, hopefully, Apple will get its act together so its ethics will be as good as its computers and phones.
False. Most companies using manufacturing facilities in China are looking the other way just like Apple. I'm not arguing that this is right, but this is the reality. Frankly, most people care more about price point (or other quality of value to them) than about the ethics when the problems are out of their peripheral view. And Chinese manufacturing is so pervasive now within every industry, where do you even start as an individual? The only way to start is to lobby the US government to enact policies which favor businesses doing manufacturing in the US.
Well, yes it is unethical. But I doubt Jobs even thought it was unethical. He had a very Jobs-centric world view, and anyone who wasn't with him was against him.
But if you're going to lambast Apple on this, you also need to call out Google and others. After Jobs complained to CEO Eric Schmidt, Schmidt told his recruiting director to make sure they don't hire any more Apple people, and the recruiting director said she would fire the person responsible immediately. "Just following orders" is never a good defense, unless you're on trial in the Hague for war crimes I guess.
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As a comparison, the Japanese never had much of this problem in previous decades. Their culture always instilled loyalty to the company you first were hired by, and by and large you stayed at that company your whole career. There was a sense of loyalty and honor by both the company and the workers -- the workers work hard for the company, and the company takes care of them. This has started to fall by the wayside the past few years, and I imagine Japan's tech giants are starting to go through the same thing, though probably much less so than their western counterparts.
This is a false dichotomy, employees vs. consumers. What do employees and consumers have in common? They are both _people_. What is the difference to companies? Companies are _not_ people. This gets forgotten by politicians sometimes, because they get most of their money from companies. But what _really_ should count in any society are _people_.
I think we really haven't heard too much what precisely is alleged, and what precisely has happened.
haha
+1
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Have you seen Dell? Or any made-in-China manufacturer?
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So?
We have that in the nuclear industry due to an aging work force. The industry started on a massive down sizing from 1995 to 2005, when they released many technical and engineering personnel to increase their bottom line. The industry went overboard, where there is a lost generation of workers in their 30ies and 40ies, with a lot of experienced workers now approaching retirement, yours truly included. Add 20 year life extension to plants, Fukushima, and new nuclear plants, companies have their back against the wall trying to maintain the plants. Exelon, in order to get EdF to drop their objection into merging with Constellation Energy, agreed, among other things agreed not to go after any employees at Calvert Cliffs for three years.
I work at a nuclear power plant in the North East, and the company maintains I'm a at will employee, which means the company can get rid of me at any time for any reason at all. However I cannot freely go elsewhere because of all these agreements between companies, honor among thieves. Thank God I become bullet proof tomorrow and retire this coming Friday.
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Not in nuclear power.
Well. First of all as we now know the agreement wend way farther than that. Besides, there is obviously a problem in that by these practices the companies create unfair advantage vs other companies which are not part of a cartel not to mention that this obviously artificially lowers engineer salaries.