Judge Lucy Koh has rejected a settlement reached earlier this year by workers and Apple, Google, Adobe and other tech companies they had worked at over an anti-poaching agreement between the companies. CNN reports that Jude Koh has ruled the settlement amount was not high enough, and should actually be at least $380 million.
The lawsuit was brought against the tech giants in question by current and former employees who believed (correctly) that their employers had created agreements to avoid attempting to hire engineers from one another. The idea was that if no competitors were making offers, each company was free to pay its employees whatever it wanted without having to worry about them jumping ship for a better offer.
Emails between the executives at the various tech firms revealed that the companies had made an agreement not to hire employees away from each other, thereby keeping employees salaries artificially low. The original settlement between all involved parties specified that the companies should pay out a total of $324.5 million to the affected employees.
