Apple, Google, Others Must Face Anti-Job-Poaching Class Action

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Apple, Google, Pixar and four other high-tech companies have been ordered to face a class action antitrust lawsuit alleging they illegally conspired with one another not to poach each other’s employees.The class action lawsuit was filed by five software engineers who accused the companies — including Intel, Adobe, Intuit and Lucasfilm — of conspiring to limit pay and job movement with “Do Not Cold Call” agreements that eliminated competition for labor, costing workers hundreds of millions of dollars.

U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh rejected a motion to dismiss their claims last week, ruling that evidence presented “supports the plausible inference that the agreements were negotiated, reached, and policed at the highest levels” of the companies.

“The fact that all six identical bilateral agreements were reached in secrecy among seven defendants in a span of two years suggests that these agreements resulted from collusion, and not from coincidence,” Koh added.

The software engineers’ claims are similar to those raised by the U.S. Department of Justice, which settled an antitrust investigation in 2010 that alleged the companies colluded to keep a cap on wages by agreeing not to poach each other’s high-tech staffers.

Presented as evidence in the litigation was a 2007 email trail from Apple’s Steve Jobs to Google’s Eric Schmidt, who at the time was the CEO of Google and also sat on the Apple board. Jobs asked Schmidt to stop recruiting an Apple engineer, which led to the eventual firing of the employee who recruited the engineer and an apology Jobs.

In her ruling, Judge Koh remarked on the “significant influence” exerted by Jobs, Schmidt and Apple and Google director Arthur Levinson, saying at least one of them had a hand in each of the anti-poaching agreements among the Defendants.

“Their overlapping board membership lends plausibility to plaintiffs’ allegations that each defendant entered into this conspiracy with knowledge of the other defendants’ participation in the conspiracy,” she wrote.

The class action lawsuit is set to go to trial in June 2013.

The case is In re: High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation, Case No. 11-cv-02509, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California.

 UPDATE 4/10/13: Class certification in the Tech Worker Anti-Poaching Class Action Lawsuit has been denied, but plaintiffs will be able to amend their complaint and try again.

UPDATE 2: The high-tech employee class action settlement has paid out! Checks were mailed the week of December 21, 2015. If you received a check, let us know in the comments. Congrats to everyone who got paid!