Several companies in the Romanian automotive industry, including Renault Technologie Roumanie and Alten, are investigated for having allegedly colluded over sharing the employees and not competing among them in this regard, News.ro reported.

The final purpose suspected by the competition body Consiliul Concurentei is keeping the wages low. The investigation focuses on the category of trained employees.

One of the companies under investigation, Segula Technologies Romania, was already fined (RON 440,000 or EUR 88,000) over refusing to disclose relevant information.

The companies investigated are Renault Technologie Roumanie, Alten Si-Techno Romania, Akka Romserv, Bertrandt Engineering Technologies Romania, Expleo Romania, Fev Ece Automotive and Segula Technologies Romania.

The so-called "no-poach" practices investigated by the Competition Council, by which companies agree not to contact, recruit and/or hire people who work and/or have worked for any of the companies involved, eliminate real competition between companies to attract employees, creating artificial barriers on the market, lowering labour mobility, even keeping it captive.

Basically, these agreements have the consequence of maintaining the level of salaries for the respective specializations at an artificial level, lower than the real one.

In recent years, European national competition authorities in countries with low wages, such as those in Lithuania, Hungary, Poland and Portugal, have begun to investigate and sanction no-poach and wage-setting agreements. 

(Photo: Poohchisa Tunsiri | Dreamstime.com)

andrei@romania-insider.com