The US DOJ secures a criminal guilty plea from a healthcare staffing company for a conspiracy to suppress the wages of school nurses (VDA OC)

Key takeaways Over the past several years, U.S. antitrust agencies have renewed enforcement focus on labor issues, including agreements involving employee hiring and compensation. These include agreements by horizontal competitors to set wages and benefits or to not solicit or hire competitors’ employees. Despite an acquittal verdict earlier this year that could have set back the DOJ’s efforts to pursue such labor-side cases as criminal violations of antitrust law, the DOJ remains undeterred. Last week, the DOJ secured its first guilty plea in a case involving competing nurse staffing agencies. In the case, staffing company VDA pleaded guilty to agreeing with an unnamed competitor to allocate nurses between the companies through a no-poach agreement and to fix compensation through an