# No-Poach Agreement A **no-poach agreement** is a secret pact between two or more employers not to recruit or hire each other's workers. Unlike a non-compete (a contract between an employer and a worker), a no-poach deal is a *horizontal agreement among firms* — which makes it a textbook antitrust violation and a direct mechanism of labor [[Monopsony]]: it suppresses wages by eliminating the bidding competition that would otherwise pull pay upward. The defining case is the late-2000s Silicon Valley cartel in which Apple, Google, Adobe, Intel, and others agreed not to cold-call each other's engineers — *High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation*, settled in 2015 for $415 million. It is a sharp irony of the tech industry: firms whose leaders publicly preach the virtues of competition (see [[Peter Thiel]] and [[Monopoly as Doctrine]]) privately colluded to *suppress* it in their own labor market. Large employers such as [[Amazon]] and franchise chains have faced similar scrutiny over no-poach clauses buried in franchise and vendor contracts. *Stub — expand with the DOJ's criminal no-poach enforcement push (2016 guidance onward) and the franchise no-poach cases.* ## See Also - [[Monopsony]] — The wage-suppression mechanism no-poach deals create - [[Non-Compete Agreement]] — The worker-side contractual cousin - [[Antitrust]] — The law that makes no-poach pacts illegal - [[Peter Thiel]] — Tech-right figure in the competition-vs-collusion irony