The hiring agreement between Google, Apple, and others that recently scandalized the tech industry may have been bigger than initially suspected. At first, it was believed to be a collusion between seven major tech firms that stifled competition and, in the process, worker wages through an agreement to not hire each others' employees. The Department of Justice eventually filed and settled a suit with the companies in question that resulted in their agreeing to bring an end to the illegal, anticompetitive practices.
But new details, which surfaced in court documents from a related civil suit, reveal that the scheme may actually have extended beyond Silicon Valley. Per a Pando Daily report, the conspiracy began as a high-level agreement between Apple's Steve Jobs and Google's Eric Schmidt before growing to encompass dozens of companies with a combined workforce exceeding one million people.
The restricted hiring agreement is best showcased by this email sent from Dell CEO Michael Dell to Schmidt:
Eric,
I learned recently that Google extend an offer to one of our sales guys, [REDACTED].
Not real happy about this and not the kind of think we would expect given our partnership.
We should discuss next time we are together but I think we should have a general understanding that we are not actively recruiting from each other.
Michael
Schmidt responded by agreeing to stop "call[ing] into Dell...for a while." The documents, embedded below, reveal more of the same, to alarming effect.
[via Pando Daily]
