Paul Barrett

[Commentary] The tech aristocrats, who from 2005 through 2009 secretly forged a series of no-recruit agreements, suspected what they were doing wasn’t quite kosher. But why did they think they could get away with it?

And now that they’ve been exposed, what does the episode tell us about the nature of a corporate culture built on the labor of a relatively well-paid but evidently exploited cohort of digitally talented serfs? Well, they did kinda get away with it.

The $324 million Apple, Google, Intel, and Adobe agreed to pay works out to about 0.4 percent of their combined total revenue for the most recent quarter. The individual plaintiffs will end up with a few thousand dollars apiece. It’s unlikely, moreover, that the defendants will suffer any lasting taint when it comes to new hires.

One reason the bosses had the cojones to try this caper is that Apple and Google in particular are the dream factories of America’s digital and marketing elites.