In recent years, competition authorities around the world have begun to focus on labour markets. They now treat agreements between employers not to hire each other’s staff (no-poach), or to cap pay and benefits for certain roles (wage-fixing) as cartels.
Authorities also consider labour market effects in merger control proceedings – for example, the US Department of Justice’s challenge to Kroger’s acquisition of Albertsons. More recently, they have classified ‘acqui-hires’ – buying a business chiefly for its people, alongside finance or intellectual property arrangements – as concentrations, as seen in the UK Competition and Markets Authority and German Bundeskartellamt review of Microsoft/Inflection AI.
Though still new, this area already features numerous live investigations across jurisdictions (see our previous blog posts (here and here), briefing and podcast for an overview).
Click here to access our full briefing paper which does two things:
- Identifies common patterns emerging from current cases that companies should consider when gauging risk.
- Highlights compliance issues beyond the usual focus on no-poach and wage-fixing, including:
- Collective bargaining, with a spotlight on self-employed workers.
- Non-solicitation clauses in M&A, confidentiality agreements, R&D cooperation agreements and distribution contracts.
- The implications for M&A more broadly.
For any questions, please feel free to approach any of the authors or your usual Freshfields contact.
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