Hello there, welcome to another MLEX podcast. I'm James Panicki, MLEX's Brussels managing editor,

and we spend a lot of time covering the corporate high flyers here at Emlex, the big names that

inevitably get caught up in any antitrust regulatory decision.

It's not often that we get to focus on price fixing that affects employees rather than products.

Yet wage fixing and so-called no-poach agreements among companies,

so these are agreements that restrict employees' ability to pick and choose their employer have been thrust back into the limelight.

The reason for this is that last October, the United States Department of Justice announced that it would switch from prosecuting wage fixing as civil antitrust violations and instead treat them as criminal violations.

So the stakes just got a lot higher.

It's an issue that hasn't escaped the attention of M-Mlex's chief global antitrust correspondent,

Leah Nylon. Leah is based in Washington, D.C., from where she joins me today. Hello, Leah.

Hello, James.

Firstly, let's talk about what wage-fixing and no-poach agreements actually are and why they're

so problematic.

Sure.

So wage-fixing agreements are ones in which different companies sort of band together

and share information about what they're paying their employees and then reach agreements

so that they won't pay, they'll pay employees about the same amount. That

way even if one were to move to another place, they wouldn't really be getting that much more

of a raise. This reduces a lot of the incentive for employees to move between jobs. It gives

the employer a little bit more leverage because they know that even if they go somewhere, if their

employee goes somewhere else, it isn't going to help that much.

No poach agreements are a little bit different.

...