Following the US Department of Justice’s first criminal conviction for labor market antitrust violations in October 2022, and with scrutiny of labor agreements increasing internationally, the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is the latest to intervene in the no-poach approach with the publication of a statement warning businesses about anticompetitive labor agreements.

‘Significant financial and personal consequences’

Anticompetitive labor agreements are a serious competition law infringement and can amount to cartel conduct. The statement by the CMA makes it unequivocally clear that collusion between employers is illegal, and that “there are significant financial and personal consequences for breaking the law.” The CMA highlights three distinct forms of anticompetitive behavior in labor markets:

1. Agreements between businesses not to approach or hire each other’s staff, or only to do so subject to the other’s consent.
2. Agreements between businesses to fix wages or other employee benefits, including maximum caps on pay or wage rates.
3. Businesses sharing sensitive information, such as terms and conditions and salaries offered to staff, which could include sharing information outside of any recruitment context (e.g., sharing or discussing such information through industry bodies via activities such as benchmarking processes, where salaries or terms of individual employers could be identified).

An agreement does not need to be in writing for it to be in breach of...

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