In October 2016, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) gave notice, through the joint release of their now-withdrawn Antitrust Guidance for Human Resource Professionals, of their intention to criminally prosecute those responsible for entering into agreements among employers to fix employee wages or not hire each other’s employees (i.e., “no-poach” agreements).
That guidance declared that “[n]aked wage-fixing or no-poaching agreements among employers, whether entered into directly or through a third-party intermediary, are per se illegal under the antitrust laws,” and warned that “[g]oing forward, the DOJ intends to proceed criminally against naked wage-fixing or no-poaching agreements.”
Since that time, the DOJ has pursued multiple such cases. Although its efforts at prosecuting no-poach agreements have largely been unsuccessful, the DOJ recently obtained a wage-fixing conviction—the first of its kind—against Eduardo Lopez in the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada. United States v. Lopez, No. 23-cr-00055 (D. Nev. Apr. 15, 2025). Lopez was convicted of leading a conspiracy to fix the wages of home health care nurses in the Las Vegas area and sentenced to 40 months in custody and $550,000 in criminal fines.
In the press release announcing the sentence, the head of the DOJ’s Antitrust Division, Assistant Attorney General Abigail A. Slater, explained that “[f]ar from being a mere ‘technical violation,’ wage fixing is a real crime that harms innocent people—in this case nurses—and today’s sentence—the Justice Department’s first ever wage-fixing conviction—reflects that such conduct will not be resolved with a fine.”
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