DOJ, EBay Reach Settlement In Hiring Antitrust Case

The Justice Department has reached a settlement with eBay Inc. that will prevent the company from entering into “handshake” non-hiring agreements with other companies for five years. The settlement, pending court approval,ends an antitrust lawsuit the government filed against eBay in 2012, alleging the company teamed with Intuit in an agreement not to hire one another’s workers, an arrangement DOJ called“a naked horizontal market allocation agreement that was manifestly anticompetitive and lacking in any redeeming virtue.” Under the terms of the agreement, eBay may not prevent any person from soliciting, cold calling, recruiting, hiring or otherwise competing for employees. Intuit, not a defendant in the case, is already working under a similar agreement.

The case is similar to another major Silicon Valley settlement announced this week, in which Apple, Google and other tech giants agreed to pay $324 million in damages for agreeing to a similar non-recruit plan, which artificially depressed the salaries of thousands of workers.