Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe – have agreed to a new settlement of $415m (£273.5m) in an attempt to resolve a lawsuit. The US lawsuit alleged the firms agreed not to poach staff from each other. It claimed the alleged agreement prevented workers from getting better job offers elsewhere. The 2011 US case had claimed $3bn in damages on behalf of more than 64,000 workers at the four firms. The latest attempt to settle the case for $415m, which was filed in court on Thursday, comes after a US judge rejected a $324.5m settlement offer last year.
You might recall that Steve Jobs even emailed then-Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt back in 2007 to ask Mountain View’s HR department to stop trying to recruit one of Apple’s engineers, as per their deal. The employees that filed the class action lawsuit accuse the companies of enforcing a no-poaching agreement in order to keep salaries low. Lucasfilm, Pixar and Intuit already settled for $20 million and the agreement’s no longer in place, but since the remaining four companies are much larger, negotiations are taking time.
