By the way, Judge Lucy Koh estimated that fees would be $82885000, so each of the 64466 class members would have received $3750, not quite the “essentially zero” that Alex at TechCrunch claims in the article you link.
Relative to the damage caused, sorry but $3750 (minus the regular income tax that will be levied on top of it) does in fact work out to "essentially zero".
It amounts to basically saying "Yeah, we artificially suppressed wages for years and years, sorry. But take this.... it is about what you would have made working for us for a week (at the suppressed wage level we created, lol!)".
The lawyers will make out really, well, though, which is why I'm generally anti-class action but happy that this decision was made.
Note how the plaintiff's attorney actually argued against this ruling (to protect their very large slice of the bird-in-the-hand pie). If they were acting for the right reasons they would be pushing for a much higher sum (even if it meant more risk) in the hope of causing sufficient punitive damage to the companies involved to really change behavior. $325.4 million split among these companies is peanuts.
$3750 is about a week's pay for a tech worker, so essentially zero.
Salaries jumped by about $30K/year when the pact collapsed, so the commenters above who are calling for the decimal point to shift a place to the right aren't all that unreasonable.
Assuming that is the true effect, it should probably 2-3x that in punitive damages otherwise the collusion was still a good idea, and next time it will be more adequately paranoid corporate types covering their asses instead of the self-assured Jobs forwarding evidence around with smileys.
I bet $3750 can barely cover one month of mortgage on a place in San Francisco. It's no small amount, but in the context of their location and cost of living it's a pittance.
Source: Judge Koh’s order http://www.scribd.com/doc/236255928/Apple-Google-Intel-Adobe...