On July 25, 2022, the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice (“DOJ”) filed a civil complaint in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland alleging that poultry processors, Cargill Inc. and Cargill Meat Solutions Corporation, Sanderson Farms Inc., and Wayne Farms LLC, engaged in a decades-long conspiracy to suppress compensation to poultry processing plant workers by exchanging competitively sensitive information about wages and benefits and collaborating on compensation policies. At the same time, the DOJ entered a proposed consent decree to settle the action with the defendants, in which the poultry processors commit to pay $84.8 million in restitution and the defendants are prohibited from engaging in certain conduct for 10 years. This settlement comes on the heels of several price fixing prosecutions in the poultry industry.[1] Although the settlement papers do not mention it explicitly, it seems likely that the conduct at issue in this matter came to light as part of one of the DOJ’s other investigations.
According to the DOJ’s complaint, the poultry processors conspired with each other and with co-defendant data consulting firm Webber, Meng, Sahl and Company, Inc. (“WMS”) for decades to exchange competitively sensitive information about poultry plant workers’ wages, with the majority of the information being current or future, disaggregated, or identifiable in nature. Examples of shared information included compensation for hourly and...
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