SAN JOSE, calif. — In Silicon Valley’s white-hot competition for tech talent, programmers can face a daily barrage of calls from recruiters seeking to woo them to rival companies with offers of better pay and perks.
But workers for some of the biggest names in the business say their phones fell silent because of a conspiracy among their employers. And they claim the world’s biggest tech icon was at the center.
A lawsuit filed in federal court in San Jose claims senior executives at Google Inc., Intel Corp., Adobe Systems Inc., Intuit Inc., Lucasfilm Ltd., Pixar and Apple Inc. violated antitrust laws by entering into secret anti-poaching agreements not to hire one another’s best workers. In doing so, the suit contends that companies were able to keep wages artificially low by preventing bidding wars for the best employees.
The plaintiffs also claim that company e-mails show Steve Jobs sought and orchestrated at least some of the so-called “gentlemen’s agreements” while he was Apple’s chief executive.
“I believe we have a policy of no recruiting from Apple,” then-Google chief executive Eric Schmidt wrote in a 2007 e-mail cited by the plaintiffs. The e-mail was originally furnished to the U.S. Justice Department, which investigated similar allegations in 2010. The same e-mail included a forwarded message from Jobs complaining that Google’s recruiting department was trying to lure away an Apple engineer.
“Can you get this stopped and let me know why this is happening?” Schmidt wrote. Google’s director of staffing replied that the recruiter “will be terminated within the hour.”
The companies’ attorneys said the facts even as presented by the plaintiffs show no evidence of a conspiracy.
Rather, they said in court filings that some companies had one-to-one pacts among themselves as they worked together on various business ventures.
“The obvious explanation for the existence of these agreements were the collaborations,” said Apple defense attorney George Riley, as the two sides squared off Thursday in U.S. District Court in San Jose. Riley told Judge Lucy Koh that such arrangements were common.
“cold-calling”
The workers’ lawsuit hinges on a practice described in court documents as “cold-calling.” Recruiters from one company will call an employee at another company who has the skills the company needs. The practice can lead to bidding wars as workers play the companies off one another to get the highest pay.
Cold-calling, the suit contends, helps workers get a sense of what they’re worth in a free market. When the cold-calling stops, workers lose the knowledge and the leverage they could otherwise use to demand higher pay.
