Naked agreements among competing employers fixing wages or benefits are treated as price fixing subject to per se condemnation. The Antitrust Division has prosecuted such agreements criminally.
Benchmarking exchanges raise related concerns.
Alternative Names:
Wage Fixing|Compensation Fixing Agreement
Why it Matters?
Compensation benchmarking surveys are the recurring compliance question, since exchanging current or forward-looking compensation data among competitors can support an agreement inference while aggregated historical data collected by a neutral third party with sufficient participants generally does not. Criminal prosecutions have produced mixed results, though civil exposure and state enforcement continue independently of those outcomes.
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Frequently asked questions
What benchmarking is safer?
Have criminal prosecutions succeeded?
