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 say the world's biggest tech icon was at the center.A lawsuit filed in federal court in San Jose claims that senior executives at Google Inc., Intel Corp., Adobe Systems, 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 says, the companies kept wages artificially low by preventing bidding wars.The plaintiffs also say company e-mails show that Steve Jobs himself sought and orchestrated at least some of the so-called gentlemen's agreements while he was Apple's CEO."I believe we have a policy of no recruiting from Apple," then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt wrote in a 2007 e-mail cited by the plaintiffs. The e-mail was originally furnished to the Justice Department, which investigated similar allegations in 2010. The e-mail included a forwarded message from Jobs saying Google's recruiting department was trying to lure away an 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 separate one-to-one pacts among themselves as they worked together on business ventures."The obvious explanation for the existence of these agreements were the collaborations," Apple defense attorney George Riley said 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.The case hinges on a practice described in court documents as cold-calling. Under the practice, recruiters from one company 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 says, helps workers get a sense of what they're worth in a free market for employment in which all the companies compete against one another for top employees. When the cold-calling stops, workers lose the knowledge and the leverage they could otherwise use to demand higher pay.The Justice Department's 2010 investigation included all the same companies except Lucasfilm, and the plaintiffs in some ways mimic the language from the department's original case. The companies settled without admitting any wrongdoing but agreed not to enter into future agreements preventing them from cold-calling one another's employees.Because the Justice Department's case was settled quietly, court records contain little detail.Some of those details did come to light, however, in a recent filing by the plaintiffs that quotes e-mails they obtained from the companies that had been given to the Justice Department.In a 2005 e-mail describing a purported agreement between former Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen and his then-counterpart at Apple, an Adobe human resources executive wrote, "Bruce and Steve Jobs have an agreement that we are not to solicit ANY Apple employees, and vice versa," according to court documents.Have more to add? News tip? Tell us
