Poaching in the entertainment industry hit the news late last year when 21st Century Fox accused Netflix, Inc. of poaching employees in Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp. v. Netflix Inc., SC12643. Poaching, or lack thereof (anti-poaching), hit the news this week as Disney settled Nitsch v. DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc., 14-cv-04062 for a whopping $100 million. Robert Nitsch Jr., a former visual effects employee at DreamWorks Animation, filed his anti-poaching pact lawsuit two years ago against several prominent animation studios. Nitsch and his fellow animators believed anti-poaching agreements among studios were preventing them from receiving higher wages and better opportunities.

Disney was the last studio to settle—Blue Sky Studios, DreamWorks Animation, Two Pic MC, Pixar, Sony Pictures Animation, and Sony Pictures Imageworks had all reached settlements with class members by October 2016. The total settlement payout will total just under $200 million.

This isn’t the first time the entertainment industry has been under fire for anti-poaching agreements. In 2010, the U.S. Justice Department filed a similar anti-poaching pact lawsuit against Pixar and Lucasfilm, as well as tech companies like Apple and Google and, a year later, a class action lawsuit was filed. Pixar and Lucasfilm settled for $9 million, but U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh refused to sign off on a $325 million settlement from the other defendants, claiming the settlement was too low. Nitsch’s lawsuit picked up where the 2011 lawsuit left off.

Why do entertainment and tech companies collude to prevent upward mobility? To protect their bottom lines by keeping labor costs down. Further, preventing worker mobility helps companies to retain highly skilled, integral employees. There really is no legal way to keep salaries down in a competitive, capitalistic society and, thus, the results of lawsuits against companies for anti-poaching pacts historically favor the plaintiffs. A settlement, and many might say an admission of guilt, from Disney, a company known for rarely settling lawsuits, goes to show how troublesome a usually verbal anti-poaching agreement can be, and the lengths to which a company must go to prevent their cooperative strategies from going public. It was rumored that Steve Jobs would call Google to express his distaste over poaching to avoid any “paper trail” that could lead to a lawsuit. Companies could avoid lawsuits and litigation by simply making offers, including other than compensation, attractive enough to employees to keep them around prevent voluntary mobility.

Many legal scholars will note that anti-poaching agreements are a direct violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. The key Sherman phrase is “conspiracy, in restraint of trade.” It’s one thing for a company to competitively act in its best interest and another for a company to conspire with competitors at the expense of employees, including its own.

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