Seven technology companies are facing an antitrust class action lawsuit for allegedly conspiring not to poach each other’s employees.

Apple Inc., Google Inc., Intel Corp.,  Adobe Systems Inc., Intuit Inc., Walt Disney Co.’s Pixar unit and Lucasfilm Ltd. were ordered by District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California to face the class action lawsuit filed against them, rejecting their bid to dismiss the case.

The class-action lawsuit was filed by five software engineers who claim that the said companies conspired to limit pay and job mobility by eliminating competition for labor, which costed workers hundreds of millions of dollars.

Koh also noted that the existence of “Do Not Cold Call” agreements among various defendants “supports the plausible inference that the agreements were negotiated, reached, and policed at the highest levels” of the companies.

“The fact that all six identical bilateral agreements were reached in secrecy among seven defendants in a span of two years suggests that these agreements resulted from collusion, and not from coincidence,” Koh added.

Joseph Saveri, the lawyer representing the five software engineers, stated that their case is on track for a 2013 trial and the judge’s decision is a “significant step forward.”

2010 antitrust case

This case is very similar to the antitrust probe file by the US Justice Department back in 2010 which stated that companies “colluded to hold down wages by agreeing not to poach each other’s employees.”

The investigation unearthed a 2007 e-mail from the late Steve Jobs, who was then Apple’s director, to Eric Schmidt stated, “I would be very pleased if your recruiting department would stop doing this.”  Schmidt forwarded the e-mail to Google employees to get to the root of things and stop the poaching.  Google’s staffing director stated that the employee poaching Apple’s engineer would be fired and added: “Please extend my apologies as appropriate to Steve Jobs.”

Further investigation revealed that in 2009, Apple and Google secretly agreed to not poach each other’s employees as Schmidt, Google’s then CEO, was serving on the board of both companies.  Apple also offered the same deal to Palm but they declined the offer, stating that it was probably illegal.

The case was settled when the companies agreed not to restrict competition for workers, including setting limits on cold-calling and recruiting, but the companies never admitted to doing anything wrong.