No-Poach Agreements Deutsch

The contract was terminated as of December 2006. In 2009, two salespeople resigned from one company to work for the other. On the basis of the non-poaching clause, the former employer sued the new employer for the payment of a fine of more than 380,000 euros (about 485,000 euros). While the regional court dismissed the appeal, the Court of Appeal quashed and ordered the defendant to pay the penalty. In the spring of 2018, Senators Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) introduced legislation called The End Employer Collusion Act to “prohibit employer-to-employer agreements that directly limit the current or future employment of a worker.” In their bill, franchise agreements are explicitly cited as objectives of the legislation. In addition, senators sent letters to nearly 100 franchised CEOs from a wide range of industries asking them not to enter into any more agreements, asking for information on each company`s practices in this area. In its simplest form, a non-poaching contract is an agreement, either in writing or orally between two or more companies, so as not to compete with the employees of the other. B, for example, by not claiming them during their employment or by hiring them for a certain period after they leave work. It is a kind of non-competitive agreement that includes non-recruitment, non-solicitation, no-hire and/or other conditions that affect an employee`s ability to move from one company to another. Companies sometimes include non-poaching clauses in comparisons that settle commercial disputes.

They may also occur in the due diligence phase of a possible merger or acquisition or in the context of franchise agreements. In this article, I talk about these so-called non-poaching agreements, recent legal infringements on their validity and applicability, and some takeaways. The Department of Justice (DOJ) and the U.S. Federal Trade (FTC) Steering Committee are available on the DOJ website. In its guidelines, the DOJ states that “[d] person is likely to violate antitrust law if he … agrees with individuals in another company that they refuse to recruit or recruit employees from another company (so-called “no poaching”). Id. at 3. The consequences of a non-poaching agreement are considerable. On the same page, the DOJ states that “non-poaching agreements between employers, whether concluded directly or through a third-party intermediary, are in themselves illegal under antitrust law.” Id.

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