Mother Jones
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
Whether waxing poetic about net neutrality or defending the merits of outsourcing, Silicon Valley execs love to talk about how a free market breeds innovation. So it might come as a surprise that some of those execs were engaged in a secret pact not to recruit one another’s employees—in other words, to game the labor market. The potentially illegal deals suppressed salaries across the sector by a whopping $3 billion, claims a class-action lawsuit scheduled for a May trial in San Jose, and were done to juice the bottom lines of some of the nation’s most profitable companies.
Documents filed in conjunction with the litigation, first reported last month by PandoDaily’s Mark Ames, offer a fascinating behind-the-scenes glimpse of interactions among the likes of Apple’s Steve Jobs, Google’s Eric Schmidt, and Intuit Chairman Bill Campbell. In early 2005, the documents show, Campbell brokered an anti-recruitment pact between Jobs and Schmidt, confirming to Jobs in an email that “Schmidt got directly involved and firmly stopped all efforts to recruit anyone from Apple.” On the day of that email, Apple’s head of human resources ordered her staff to “please add Google to your ‘hands off’ list.'” Likewise, Google’s recruiting director was asked to create a formal “Do Not Cold Call List” of companies with which it had “special agreements” not to compete for employees.
A few months later, Schmidt instructed a fellow exec not to discuss the no-call list other than “verbally,” he wrote in an email, “since I don’t want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later?”
Eric Schmidt Google
Good luck with that. The “no poaching policies,” as they were known among senior-level executives at companies such as Adobe, Intuit, Intel, and Pixar, were first exposed by a 2010 anti-trust lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice. The DOJ complaint is the basis for the current class action, which was filed in 2011 by the San Francisco law firm Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, alleging that some 64,000 tech workers were harmed.
The case, interestingly, has garnered little attention outside of the tech world. Sure, the average middle-class worker probably won’t shed a tear for the most likely victim here: Silicon Valley code jockeys and junior execs banking six-figure salaries and perhaps million-dollar stock options. The Bay Area, after all, is recently ablaze with animosity over tech-fueled gentrification and income inequality. And yet the collusion of CEOs to artificially suppress high-end salaries speaks to an economic malaise that affects every working stiff: The widening gap between the rich and poor isn’t some accident of free-market capitalism, but the product of a system that puts corporate leaders and their shareholders ahead of everyone else.
The lawsuit describes the rapid spread of anti-recruitment pacts between 2004 and 2007—arrangements perhaps facilitated by the overlap on Silicon Valley’s corporate boards: Jobs, who became Disney’s largest shareholder after it bought Pixar, served on Disney’s board until his death in 2011. Eric Schmidt sat on Apple’s board until 2009, and Intuit Chairman Bill Campbell (a former Schmidt advisor) still does. Intel CEO Paul Otellini has held a seat on Google’s board since 2004. Such close ties have long been seen as a problem for shareholders, but the non-recruitment pacts suggest that such cozy relationships could harm workers, too.
Steve Jobs, according to unsealed court documents obtained by Mother Jones, was a leading advocate and enforcer of the non-recruitment pacts. Two months after entering into the agreement with Google, he emailed Bruce Chizen, then Adobe’s CEO, complaining that Adobe was poaching Apple employees. Chizen’s reply, that he thought they’d agreed only to avoid “senior level employees,” didn’t satisfy Jobs. “OK, I’ll tell our recruiters that they are free to approach any Adobe employee who is not Sr. Director or VP,” he shot back. “Am I understanding your position correctly?”
Steve Jobs Acaben
Chizen responded that he would rather the arrangement apply to all employees:
DV.load(“//www.documentcloud.org/documents/1019491-adobe-apple-emails.js”,
width: 630,
height: 500,
sidebar: false,
container: “#DV-viewer-1019491-adobe-apple-emails”
);
Adobe Apple Emails (PDF)
Adobe Apple Emails (Text)
The next day, Adobe’s vice president of human resources announced to her recruiting team that “Bruce and Steve Jobs have an agreement that we not solicit ANY Apple employees, and vice versa.”
In one instance not yet reported, Jobs allegedly played hardball with a reluctant CEO. In mid-2007, he called Edward Colligan, then president and CEO of Palm, to propose “an arrangement between Palm and Apple by which neither company would hire the other’s employees,” Colligan testified in a sworn deposition. When he refused, citing the deal’s possible illegality, Jobs threatened to sue Palm for patent infringement. “I’m sure you realize the asymmetry in financial resources of our respective companies…,” he wrote Colligan in a followup email. “My advice is to take a look at your patent portfolio before you make a final decision here.”
The Valley’s hush-hush wage-control policies have been in play at least since the 1980s, soon after Jobs bought Lucasfilm’s “computer graphics division” and renamed it Pixar. As George Lucas later put it in a deposition, firms in the digital-filmmaking realm “could not get into a bidding war with other companies because we don’t have the margins for that sort of thing.” Lucas and Pixar’s then-president, Edward Catmull, made the following agreement, according to the lawsuit:
(1) not to cold call each other’s employees; (2) to notify each other when making an offer to an employee of the other company even if that employee applied for a job on his or her own initiative; and (3) that any offer would be “final” and would not be improved in response to a counter-offer by the employee’s current employer (whether Lucasfilm or Pixar).
George Lucas redtouchmedia/flickr
After its purchase by Disney in 2006, Pixar made the same “gentleman’s agreement” with Apple, according to unsealed emails from the lawsuit. (Last year, Pixar, Lucasfilm, and Intuit settled their part of the class-action lawsuit for an undisclosed sum in a deal that allows the affected employees to file anonymous claims.)
In its earlier anti-trust suit, the DOJ argued that the Valley’s no-poaching agreements were patently illegal—clear violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act’s ban on restraining interstate commerce. In 2011, without admitting fault or paying fines, Google, Apple, and four other tech firms settled with the DOJ and agreed to discontinue their anti-competitive behavior.
Representatives for Apple and Google declined to comment for this story, but Google argued at the time that its pacts hadn’t hurt workers. There’s “no evidence that our policy hindered hiring or affected wages,” a Google attorney wrote on the company’s public policy blog. But “we abandoned our ‘no cold calling’ policy in late 2009 once the Justice Department raised concerns, and are happy to continue with this approach as part of the settlement.”
Whether and how the pacts truly affected wages is at the heart of the ongoing suit, which is slated for trial May 27. The defendant firms insist that their employees’ salaries weren’t widely suppressed because they were based on a “pay for performance” model. That is, workers got raises based on their accomplishments, not on what their co-workers earned.
Continue Reading »
See original:
"I Don’t Want to Create a Paper Trail": Inside the Secret Apple-Google Pact
