Apple, Google, Intel and three other US technology giants agreed on Friday to settle charges they had illegally entered into agreements not to poach each other’s employees.
The Justice Department said the settlement, which has been submitted to a US District Court for approval, would prevent Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit and Pixar from forging so-called “no solicitation” agreements for employees.
“The agreements challenged here restrained competition for affected employees without any pro-competitive justification and distorted the competitive process,” deputy assistant attorney general Molly Boast said.
“The proposed settlement resolves the department’s antitrust concerns with regard to these no solicitation agreements,” Boast said in a statement.
According to the department, the firms had entered into agreements not to directly solicit each other’s employees, a practice known as “cold-calling.”
Their actions “disrupted the normal price-setting mechanisms that apply in the labor setting,” it said.
The Justice Department said the agreements were between Apple and Google, Apple and Adobe, Apple and Pixar, Google and Intel and Google and Intuit.
In the proposed settlement, the firms do not admit violating the law.
But they are prohibited from “entering, maintaining or enforcing any agreement that in any way prevents any person from soliciting, cold calling, recruiting, or otherwise competing for employees.”
The settlement, if accepted by the US District Court for the District of Columbia, would be in effect for five years.
According to the complaint, Apple and Google executives agreed in 2006 not to “cold call” each other’s employees and Apple reached a similar agreement with software maker Adobe in 2005.
Apple and Pixar reached such an agreement in 2007 while Google and computer chip giant Intel and Google and software maker Intuit did so in 2007, it said.
To many, Tatu City on the outskirts of Nairobi looks like a success. The first city entirely built by a private company to be operational in east Africa, with about 25,000 people living and working there, it accounts for about two-thirds of all foreign investment in Kenya. Its low-tax status has attracted more than 100 businesses including Heineken, coffee brand Dormans, and the biggest call-center and cold-chain transport firms in the region. However, to some local politicians, Tatu City has looked more like a target for extortion. A parade of governors have demanded land worth millions of dollars in exchange
Hong Kong authorities ramped up sales of the local dollar as the greenback’s slide threatened the foreign-exchange peg. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) sold a record HK$60.5 billion (US$7.8 billion) of the city’s currency, according to an alert sent on its Bloomberg page yesterday in Asia, after it tested the upper end of its trading band. That added to the HK$56.1 billion of sales versus the greenback since Friday. The rapid intervention signals efforts from the city’s authorities to limit the local currency’s moves within its HK$7.75 to HK$7.85 per US dollar trading band. Heavy sales of the local dollar by
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) revenue jumped 48 percent last month, underscoring how electronics firms scrambled to acquire essential components before global tariffs took effect. The main chipmaker for Apple Inc and Nvidia Corp reported monthly sales of NT$349.6 billion (US$11.6 billion). That compares with the average analysts’ estimate for a 38 percent rise in second-quarter revenue. US President Donald Trump’s trade war is prompting economists to retool GDP forecasts worldwide, casting doubt over the outlook for everything from iPhone demand to computing and datacenter construction. However, TSMC — a barometer for global tech spending given its central role in the
The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday met with some of the nation’s largest insurance companies as a skyrocketing New Taiwan dollar piles pressure on their hundreds of billions of dollars in US bond investments. The commission has asked some life insurance firms, among the biggest Asian holders of US debt, to discuss how the rapidly strengthening NT dollar has impacted their operations, people familiar with the matter said. The meeting took place as the NT dollar jumped as much as 5 percent yesterday, its biggest intraday gain in more than three decades. The local currency surged as exporters rushed to
RSS