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Cozy Hiring Agreements used as Evidence in Anti Trust Poaching Class-Action

Written by J.D. HILDEBRAND Tuesday, 24 January 2012 15:07

The Evidence Demonstrates that Google, Apple, Intel, Intuit, Pixar and Adobe, Conspired To Manipulate and Keep Wages Low

We all know that high-tech firms do their best to retain valuable employees. Salaries and stock options are just the beginning. There are also awards programs, aid for ongoing education, and many more perks. Some of the industry's biggest companies have the most creative retention programs—for example, Google's laid-back Googleplex workplace is specifically designed to help the company attract and keep the programming cream of the crop.

Given the competition over scarce superprogrammer resources, you would expect high-tech companies to raid each other's cubicle farms like crazy. But according to documents recently made public by the U.S. Department of Justice, that is not the case. In fact, just the opposite has occurred. It appears that top execs at Google, Apple, Pixar, Adobe, Intel, Intuit, and Lucasfilm made gentlemen's agreements not to recruit each other's employees.

According to the documents, the six companies not only agreed not to “poach” employees from each other, but they also agreed not to give employees offers if they applied voluntarily. The companies even agreed to notify each other when employees tried to switch jobs. The agreements were apparently made at the companies' very highest executive levels. For example, the court papers include an e-mail message from Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen to Apple's Steve Jobs titled “Recruitment of Apple Employees.”

The problem with these agreements is that they can be illegal—especially if they are made for the purpose of preventing bidding wars for talent, hindering employees' efforts to negotiate for higher salaries, and artificially keeping compensation low.

Click Here to See the Initial Complaint UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division v. ADOBE SYSTEMS, INC.; APPLE INC.; GOOGLE INC.;INTEL CORPORATION; INTUIT, INC. ; PIXAR http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f262600/262654.htm

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Author of this article: J.D. HILDEBRAND

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