Passage to India: Labour-market antitrust as a global phenomenon

India's move marks a predictable but significant milestone. The CCI had, until recently, pointed its energy at digital markets, publishing and then recalibrating its Digital Competition Bill during 2024 after industry pushback. Labour markets sat outside that agenda. The new inquiry shifts that posture.

The investigation into no-poach arrangements concerns three global fragrance companies and took place after one company approached the CCI under its leniency programme, which offers confidentiality and reduced penalties in exchange for evidence of wrongdoing. Since last year, the CCI has found prima facie merit in allegations that the firms had a “gentlemen's agreement” not to hire or poach employees from rivals or customers, whether in India or globally. These discussions were coordinated through emails, phone calls, and messaging-app exchanges. The investigation has been referred to the Director General, whose report - a process that can take over a year - will determine whether a formal infringement is established.

The world's most populous labour market, with its rapidly professionalising IT and start-up ecosystems, is now firmly on the enforcer's radar, potentially aligning it more closely with the EU Commission's enforcement priorities. The institutional scaffolding for that is already in place. Since 2013, DG COMP and the CCI have cooperated under a bilateral MoU, formalized through the annual EU-India Competition Week launched in 2018. That channel has mostly carried digital-market expertise eastward but may well be a channel through which labour-antitrust thinking might travel.

Indian doctrine, however, which is concerned with “appreciable adverse effects on competition” (AAEC), will face a similar threshold choice that European and American regulators have grappled with: treat no-poach and wage-fixing as per-se or object restrictions, or keep space for effects analysis in sector-specific contexts. The answer will shape enforcement intensity across South Asia for years.

Europe's trajectory has been anything but linear. As late as June 2022, then-Director-General Olivier Guersent told a public panel that the EU Commission was "looking at" how Article 101 TFEU might apply in labour-market settings but had no open case. Within weeks, unannounced inspections at Delivery Hero and Glovo signalled that the posture had changed. A second wave of raids in November 2023 widened the probe to alleged no-poach agreements and exchanges of commercially sensitive information – the first time the Commission formally pursued labour-market (mis-)conduct.

The decision of 2 June 2025 closed the loop. The EU Commission fined the two companies a combined EUR 329 million for a single and continuous infringement combining three elements: (1) reciprocal no-poach commitments; (2) exchanges of strategic information on prices, expansion, and capacity; and (3) market allocation across the EEA. Critically, the Commission found that Delivery Hero's minority stake in Glovo had operated less as a passive investment than as something that, in the Commission's framing, "facilitated" anticompetitive practices – with board seats, consent rights, and informal executive communications via messaging apps providing the operational forum.

Doctrinally, the EU Commission treated each element as a restriction of competition "by object", declining to accept either ancillary-restraint or Article 101(3) justifications. That position builds on the authority's Policy Brief "Antitrust in Labour Markets" published in May 2024 and aligns with the broader direction later set out by outgoing cartel director Maria Jaspers: no-poach, no-hire, and wage-fixing are no longer peripheral concerns.

The European Court of Justice has recently calibrated that line. The judgment in Case C-133/24 Tondela, handed down on 30 April 2026, largely confirmed the premise of Attorney General Emiliou last year, but adopted a more enforcement-friendly framing: a no-poach agreement among competing football clubs (as in the case at hand) must be categorised as having as its object the restriction of competition, unless a specific examination of the content of that agreement, its objective aims from a competition standpoint and the specific economic and legal context of which it forms part makes clear the specific reasons why it should not be so categorised. The Court formalised a graduated framework under which classic cartel-type coordination requires only limited contextual review, while other horizontal agreements – including no-poach arrangements – may demand a "more in-depth examination" of the factual and economic setting. Specifically, the Court recognised that the COVID-19 pandemic-era agreement pursued simultaneously an "objectively anticompetitive aim" (restricting the player recruitment market) and an "objectively pro-competition aim" (preserving roster stability and competitive integrity) yet left unresolved what legal consequences flow from such a dual finding. However, the Court leaves room for the EU Commission to continue pursuing its hard line in enforcement in labour markets. Bar pandemic-level disruptions or other unique factual features calling the “by object” framing into question, few agreements will clear the “context filter” endorsed by the Court (see also our article here dealing the judgment in more detail).

That judgment will likely be watched carefully by the CCI as it develops its own analytical framework: whether India follows the EU object-restriction approach or (more strongly) carves out space for effects-based analysis in sector-specific contexts may be one of the most consequential considerations in South Asian competition law in the coming years.

For the EU Commission, Maria Jaspers has already signalled that data-centre construction is the market concerned in this area, with ongoing investigations expected to sharpen the contours of lawful HR cooperation between companies.

Notably, the EU Commission did not blaze this trail alone. Portugal's Autoridade da Concorrência (AdC) began circulating best-practice guidance on labour cartels in 2021, sanctioned 31 football clubs in 2022, and in February 2025 fined a multinational IT-consultancy EUR 3.1 million in a settlement-heavy investigation that has become the AdC's signature workstream.

France has since overtaken Portugal in scale. In June 2025, the Autorité de la concurrence imposed EUR 29.5 million in combined fines on three technology-consultancy operators over informal, open-ended "gentlemen's agreements", with a fourth competitor receiving full immunity as the leniency applicant. The decision draws a workable line: informal, cross-employer commitments are illegal, but project-bounded, time-limited non-solicits tied to a genuine commercial transaction may stand.

Other European enforcers also stand out:

• Belgium's competition authority fined three private-security providers a combined EUR 47 million in July 2024 for a twelve-year cartel that involved price coordination, bid rigging, and no-poach commitments.
• Italy's AGCM opened its first stand-alone no-poach inquiry in January 2026, targeting automation and packaging-equipment suppliers.
• Slovakia's AMO sanctioned an industry association in June 2025 for an ethics-code provision restricting cross-employer recruitment – its first labour-market cartel case.
• The Nordic countries presented a coordinated multilateral perspective: the Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Icelandic and Finnish Competition Authorities jointly published a report on competition and labour markets in 2024, surveying national enforcement and issuing coordinated guidance on no-poach and wage-fixing.

The Netherlands' ACM has flagged the topic publicly since 2022 without yet taking formal action. Germany's FCO, by contrast, has remained conspicuously silent. No investigation, no guidance. For a jurisdiction that otherwise keeps pace with European enforcement trends, that gap is surprising – but, likely, temporary.

It is worth recalling, especially against the backdrop of current transatlantic tensions, that the United States supplied the intellectual scaffolding for investigations of this type. The DOJ has long pursued no-poach and wage-fixing as per-se criminal violations under Section 1 of the Sherman Act, backed by the 2016 DOJ/FTC HR antitrust guidance and 2023's revised Merger Guidelines, which treat labour-market effects as a standalone concern. Courtroom delivery, however, has proved harder: in April 2023 a federal judge in Connecticut acquitted six aerospace executives, and jury outcomes have repeatedly failed to convert indictments into convictions. The FTC's 2024 rule banning most non-competes has faced its own headwinds in federal court. Priority, however, has not wavered.

Further across the Atlantic, Brazil's CADE has also been notably active. It opened its first labour-market cartel probe in March 2021 against well over 30 healthcare-sector employers for systematic exchanges of salary and benefits data, and in October 2024 extended the approach to more than thirty consumer-goods multinationals for a decades-long HR-data exchange via the informal Grupo de Empresas de Consumo (GECON). In the authority’s view, coordination on salary components ranks alongside classic price-fixing in gravity and sanction.

Rounding out the picture, the United Kingdom's CMA entered the field in March 2025 with its first labour-market decision, fining four broadcast and sports-production companies a combined GBP 4.2 million for information exchanges on freelance sports-production pay. The published infringement decision identified fifteen bilateral infringements, also involving a leniency applicant. CMA leadership has confirmed that labour markets remain a standing priority. From October 2025, the CMA has also finalised changes to its leniency regime following a public consultation earlier that year. The revised guidance aims to update and streamline the application process and emphasise the incentives for cartel participants to come forward for leniency, with a particular focus on creating a sharper distinction between the 'first through the door' and subsequent applicants – a clear signal that further enforcement is actively anticipated.

While India has made one of the first formal moves in South Asia, other regional enforcers are building the legal infrastructure that could support similar enforcement:

• Singapore: Section 34 of Singapore’s Competition Act 2004 prohibits horizontal agreements that prevent, restrict or distort competition, and would on its face cover no-poach and wage-fixing arrangements between competing employers. The Competition and Consumer Commission of Singapore has yet to open a standalone labour-market case; however, the ASEAN Framework Agreement on Competition – negotiations for which concluded in June 2024 – creates a formal cooperation framework across ASEAN member states that could facilitate the cross-border exchange of enforcement intelligence, mirroring the function of the EU-India MoU channel.
• Hong Kong: The Competition Commission Hong Kong (HKCC) made its substantive position clear as early as April 2018, when it published an Advisory Bulletin explicitly stating that no-poach and wage-fixing arrangements between competing employers fall within the First Conduct Rule of the Competition Ordinance (Cap. 619) and characterising such arrangements as having the "object of harming competition." Against this backdrop, in December 2024, the HKCC signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Hong Kong's Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) establishing a framework for joint investigations, information exchange, and case referrals in matters that span both anti-competitive and corrupt practices. As such, an HR arrangement that simultaneously suppresses labour-market competition and involves corrupt inducements (whether to internal decision-makers or external intermediaries) is now within the shared investigative jurisdiction of both agencies.
• Japan: Japan’s Act on Prohibition of Private Monopolisation and Maintenance of Fair Trade does not recognise a per-se illegal category. Nevertheless, the Freelance Law (Act on Ensuring Proper Transactions Involving Specified Entrusted Business Operators), which entered into force on 1 November 2024, addresses the contractual and payment rights of gig workers outside the standard labour law framework, signalling growing regulatory sensitivity to non-standard employment arrangements.