$28.5 Million Settlement Approved in Healthcare No-Poach Case

A Pennsylvania court has approved a $28.5 million settlement in a case in which two Pennsylvania healthcare companies, Geisinger Health and Evangelical Community Hospital, were alleged to have a collusive agreement to not poach each other’s employees. Econ One was retained by counsel for class plaintiffs in this matter for analyzing relevant markets, common impact and damages for a class of nearly 12,000 healthcare workers. Dr. Phillip Johnson and the late Prof. Edward Leamer submitted expert analysis in the matter, supported by Dr. Niyati Ahuja and a team at Econ One.

Plaintiffs alleged that the defendants secretly agreed not to recruit each other’s staff, suppressing wages and restricting worker mobility in violation of antitrust laws. Analysis performed by Econ One involved establishing common impact and damages across five categories of healthcare workers, as well as defining the relevant labor markets and assessing employer market power. The empirical work involved analyzing over ten years of complex compensation data and developing robust regression models to estimate class-wide wage suppression and test for common impact across the large class of many types of healthcare workers.

Dr. Phillip Johnson has testified and/or consulted in numerous labor antirust class action matters including In Re: High Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation, Seaman v. Duke University, Hunter et. al. v. Booz Allen Hamilton, Inc, and Robinson et al. v. Jackson Hewitt.