Two of the most powerful people in the technology world secretly and perhaps illegally coordinated business strategies in which they agreed not to poach each other’s employees, thereby keeping salaries low, according to emails unveiled in federal court.
Apple founder Steve Jobs and Google CEO Eric Schmidt apparently kept a secret pact to institute a “no-hire” policy in which each executive promised not to recruit each other’s workers. Yet the tech superstars are just two of the business leaders to be implicated in the wink-wink agreement, which reportedly included Google, Apple, Intel, Adobe, Intuit, and Pixar.
According to Pando Daily journalist Mark Ames, the scheme began in early 2005, when the need for Silicon Valley engineers was at an all-time high. The deal’s consequences became so pervasive that the US Department of Justice launched an antitrust investigation in 2010, which laid the groundwork for a class action lawsuit filed on behalf of more than 100,000 Silicon Valley employees who allege they were deprived of over $9 billion since 2000.
The US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals refused to throw out the class action suit over the objections of executives at Apple, Google, Intel, and Adobe. The emails in question were unsealed Tuesday by Judge Lucy Koh, the same judge who presided over the Samsung-Apple patent lawsuit.
Filed under: Apple, Big Tech, Corporations, Google, Science & Technology
