Corporate Greed Case Study: Veterinary Match Program & Its Impact on Young Veterinarians
TLDR: A sweeping class-action lawsuit alleges that the biggest names in veterinary medicine—including corporate giants like VCA Animal Hospitals and prestigious universities like Penn and Cornell—are engaged in a long-running conspiracy to artificially suppress the wages of new veterinarians. The complaint claims these institutions use a mandatory, centralized hiring system called the “Match Program” to eliminate competition, forbid salary negotiations, and lock recent graduates into low-paying, high-stress internships and residencies. This system forces highly skilled doctors, often burdened with six-figure student debt, to work grueling hours for compensation that can fall below a living wage, all to the financial benefit of their employers.
Read on to understand the mechanics of this scheme, the corporate and academic powers involved, and how it reflects a systemic failure to protect skilled workers from coordinated exploitation.
Introduction: A Profession in Crisis
For many, becoming a veterinarian is a lifelong dream fueled by a passion for animal welfare. The reality for recent graduates, however, is often a nightmare of debt and exploitation. A landmark lawsuit filed in the Western District of Virginia paints a grim picture of a profession where the most powerful employers—from private equity-owned hospital chains to billion-dollar universities—have colluded for decades to suppress the wages of their most vulnerable workers.
This is not a story of a few bad actors. It is an examination of a systemic structure, the Veterinary Internship and Residency Matching Program (VIRMP), that functions as a nationwide wage-fixing conspiracy. The legal complaint argues this program replaces a competitive labor market with a rigid, centralized system that strips young veterinarians of any bargaining power, driving their compensation down to levels that belie their extensive training and crushing student loan debt. This case offers a brutal look at how modern capitalism can create systems that prioritize profit maximization and cost reduction at the direct expense of workers’ financial security and mental well-being.
Inside the Allegations: Corporate Misconduct
At the heart of the lawsuit is the Veterinary Internship and Residency Matching Program, or “The Match.” The legal complaint alleges that this program, sponsored by the American Association of Veterinary Clinicians (AAVC), is not a benign placement service but a sophisticated mechanism for restraining trade in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. The core of the misconduct lies in the program’s strict, non-negotiable rules that both employers and applicants must accept.
These rules explicitly prohibit any negotiation over salary or benefits. Applicants and institutions are forbidden from communicating about employment terms outside the rigid framework of The Match until the results are announced. On a single “Match Day,” each applicant is assigned to one, and only one, position. The terms of service contractually obligate the applicant to accept that position, regardless of the pay or working conditions. An applicant who refuses a match, or an institution that negotiates outside the system, faces a ban of at least three years, effectively ending a veterinarian’s chance to pursue a specialty.
The lawsuit claims this system gives employers, including the defendants, the power to set wages at artificially low levels without fear of competition. They know that applicants have no other offers to leverage and are contractually bound to accept what they are given. This arrangement has allegedly allowed for the widespread suppression of compensation across the entire market for veterinary interns and residents, which The Match controls by an estimated 90 percent.
Timeline of an Alleged Annual Conspiracy
The lawsuit describes the wage-fixing conspiracy as a continuing violation that renews its cycle annually. This timeline, constructed from the legal complaint attached at the bottom of this article, illustrates how this exploitative system methodically eliminates competition year after year.
| Period | Action Taken within “The Match” Program |
| Each September | Employer defendants and veterinary schools input their internship and residency positions into the VIRMP database, agreeing to the program’s anti-negotiation terms. |
| Each October | The Match administrators publish a list of available positions, which is updated through the beginning of November. |
| Each November | The application becomes available, and applicants begin the process of ranking their preferred programs, agreeing to accept whichever position they are matched with. |
| First Week of January | The deadline for applicants to submit their applications passes. |
| Each February | Applicants must submit their final rank-order lists, locking in their preferences without any ability to negotiate terms. |
| Each March | On “Match Day,” the program’s algorithm releases the binding results, assigning each applicant to a single position. Negotiations are eliminated, and employment is mandated. |
Regulatory Capture & Legal Loopholes
The conspiracy detailed in the lawsuit thrives not by breaking laws in the shadows, but by creating a private system that functions as its own regulatory body.
The Match Program, administered by industry associations like the AAVC and AVMA, effectively replaces the free market with a set of privately enforced rules. This structure is a powerful example of how industries can create frameworks that serve the interests of their most powerful members, a hallmark of neoliberal economic logic.
The system’s “Terms of Service” operate as a binding contract that eliminates the fundamental right of a worker to negotiate their labor. By making participation in The Match a practical necessity for career advancement, the defendants have created a bottleneck. Aspiring specialists have no realistic alternative but to submit to these anticompetitive conditions.
This is a form of regulatory capture where the regulated (the employers) and the regulators (the industry associations) are one and the same. The complaint highlights that leaders from defendant universities sit on the executive committee of the AAVC, the very organization that sponsors and enforces the illegal system.
This creates a feedback loop where the rules are designed and implemented by the same entities that benefit financially from the suppression of wages. The system operates in a legal gray area, using contract law to enforce what the lawsuit claims is a clear violation of federal antitrust law.
Profit-Maximization at All Costs
The lawsuit names some of the largest and wealthiest players in the veterinary and academic fields as defendants, suggesting the wage suppression is a deliberate strategy to enhance profits and control labor costs. The “Employer Defendants” are massive corporate consolidators, many owned by private equity firms and global conglomerates. They own bottomless amounts of cash that should be used to pay their workers!
VCA Animal Hospitals is owned by Mars, Inc., a multi-billion dollar corporation. Ethos Veterinary Health was acquired by private equity firm JAB Consumer Partners in a deal worth $1.65 billion.
These corporations have a fiduciary duty to maximize returns for their shareholders, and reducing labor costs is one of the most direct ways to achieve that. The complaint argues they participate in The Match because the cost savings from suppressed wages far outweigh the program’s participation fees. The system allows them to acquire highly skilled labor at a fraction of its market value.
The “Veterinary School Defendants” represent another dimension of this profit-driven model. These universities control vast endowments, with the complaint citing figures like $20.5 billion for the University of Pennsylvania and $10.7 billion for Cornell University. Despite their immense wealth and non-profit status, these institutions participate in the same wage-suppressing scheme. Interns and residents provide critical, low-cost labor for their veterinary teaching hospitals, which are significant revenue centers. The profit motive, whether for shareholders or for institutional budgets, appears to override any ethical commitment to fair pay for their graduates.
Exploitation of Workers: A Crushing Reality
The human cost of this disgusting scheme is devastating. The lawsuit methodically lays out a reality where the people we trust to care for our animals are themselves subjected to grueling and financially unsustainable working conditions. The lawsuit presents a chilling contrast between the high cost of a veterinary education and the meager compensation offered through The Match.
Veterinarians graduate with a staggering amount of debt, with a reported mean of $178,585 for those who took out loans. In exchange for this investment, those who enter The Match are rewarded with notoriously long hours, often exceeding 60 hours per week. The legal complaint cites a study finding that most interns and residents work 11 to 13-hour weekdays, with nearly half also working weekends.
When this workload is measured against the salaries, the compensation often falls below a living wage. The lawsuit highlights that for the 2020-2021 training year, the mean annual salary for an academic internship was just $28,372, which could translate to an hourly wage of only $9.09. This is substantially less than the median wage for fast-food workers in 2021.
One study cited found that 92% of internship programs and 87% of residency programs paid below an hourly living wage. The system pushes highly educated medical professionals into a state of financial precarity.
A Comparison of Debt, Pay, and Market Value
The table below, based on figures presented in the complaint, illustrates the dramatic disparity between the financial burden carried by veterinarians and the compensation they receive through the anticompetitive Match Program.
| Metric | Figure Reported in Complaint |
| Mean Educational Debt (2020 Graduates) | $178,585 |
| Mean Academic Internship Salary (2020-21) | $28,372 |
| Mean Academic Residency Salary (2020-21) | $35,098 |
| Estimated Hourly Wage for Intern (based on 60-hr week) | Approx. $9.09/hour |
| Median Hourly Wage for Fast Food Worker (2021) | $12.07/hour |
| Mean Private Practice Salary for New Grad (2023, outside The Match) | $125,416 |
| Mean Public Practice Salary for New Grad (2023, outside The Match) | $87,417 |
This data paints a clear picture of exploitation. While new graduates who bypass the internship/residency track can earn a competitive salary, those who aspire to become specialists are funneled into a system that pays them a fraction of their worth.
This financial strain is directly linked in the complaint to unusually high rates of depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and suicidal ideation among veterinary interns and residents.
Community Impact: A Profession Under Duress
While the lawsuit focuses on the direct harm to veterinarians, the conspiracy has profound implications for the communities they serve. A veterinary workforce suffering from financial distress, overwork, and severe mental health challenges cannot consistently provide the highest quality of care animals deserve. The complaint details how interns and residents are the front-line labor in many specialty and emergency hospitals, managing cases, interacting with specialists, and even supervising students.
When these critical caregivers are paid wages below the poverty line and work dangerously long hours, the risk of burnout and medical error increases. The system described in the complaint fosters an environment where the well-being of the practitioner is disregarded in the pursuit of lower labor costs. This dynamic ultimately affects the pet-owning public, who rely on a healthy, stable, and motivated veterinary profession. The consolidation of the market, with private equity firms “gobbling up competitors,” further concentrates power and may reduce consumer choice, leaving pet owners with fewer options outside of these large corporate systems.
The PR Machine: The Spin of “Wellbeing”
The organizations administering The Match are aware of the dire conditions faced by interns and residents. The complaint reveals a sophisticated public relations effort to address the crisis, framing it as a matter of individual “wellbeing” rather than a consequence of systemic wage suppression. The American Association of Veterinary Medical Colleges (AAVMC) publishes data on salaries and working conditions and has even issued “Guidelines for Veterinary Intern & Resident Wellbeing”.
These guidelines suggest limiting on-duty hours to 60 per week and promote the idea of a “living wage,” offering $15/hour as one such example. The lawsuit presents this as a hollow gesture. The very organizations offering these “solutions” are the ones who designed and profit from the system that necessitates them. By focusing on “wellbeing,” the defendants shift the focus away from the root cause: an illegal, anticompetitive system that forbids negotiation and guarantees low pay. It’s a classic corporate strategy: applying a public-facing bandage to a problem while ensuring the underlying profit-generating structure remains untouched.
Wealth Disparity & Corporate Greed
The gap between the wealth of the defendants and the poverty of the workers they employ is staggering. The complaint makes clear that this is not a case of employers who cannot afford to pay more. The defendants are among the most financially powerful entities in America. Corporate defendants like VCA, Ethos, Thrive, and MedVet are billion-dollar enterprises backed by private equity and global giants like Mars, Inc.
The university defendants control endowments worth billions of dollars, with Penn at $20.5 billion, Cornell at $10.7 billion, and OSU at $7.9 billion. These institutions charge exorbitant tuition, driving the very debt that makes their graduates vulnerable. They then participate in a system that pays those same graduates a salary of around $28,000 a year. This is corporate greed in its purest form—a coordinated effort by the wealthiest players to extract maximum value from the labor of the indebted, all while maintaining a veneer of academic and professional prestige.
A Pattern of Predation
While the complaint focuses specifically on the veterinary profession, the alleged scheme is not unique in the landscape of American capitalism. The use of centralized “matching” programs to allocate labor and control compensation has been a feature of other professional fields and has faced antitrust challenges before. This model represents a recurring pattern of predation where organized, powerful employers use their collective market power to disadvantage individual workers.
The system described in the lawsuit is a microcosm of a broader neoliberal trend: the replacement of open, competitive markets with privately administered, quasi-cartel systems that benefit capital over labor. It demonstrates how professional associations, which are supposed to advocate for their members, can be captured by corporate interests and repurposed to enforce industry-wide collusion. The alleged conspiracy against veterinarians is a textbook example of how such systems are designed to systematically dismantle worker power.
Corporate Accountability Fails the Public
The alleged conspiracy has been operating since 1978. For over four decades, thousands of veterinarians have passed through this system, their wages artificially depressed and their bargaining rights extinguished. The fact that such a widespread and long-running scheme could operate in plain sight represents a profound failure of corporate accountability.
The institutions involved are household names and respected pillars of academia and business. They have allegedly participated in this system annually, fully aware of the terms that prohibit negotiation and bind applicants to a single offer. The failure lies not just with the defendants, but with a regulatory and legal environment that has allowed such a blatant restraint of trade to persist unchallenged for generations. This lawsuit is a challenge to a decades-long status quo of impunity.
Pathways for Reform
The harm caused by The Match is not an unavoidable outcome of a complex labor market. The lawsuit explicitly argues that viable, less restrictive alternatives exist that could achieve the program’s stated goals without its anticompetitive consequences. The core of the problem is not the centralization of applications, but the bundling of that convenience with illegal wage-fixing mechanisms.
The plaintiffs suggest a clear pathway for reform. The defendants could create a common application portal that streamlines the process for both applicants and employers. However, this system would not bar applicants from negotiating, prevent them from seeking offers outside the system, or contractually obligate them to accept the first position they are offered.
Furthermore, the defendants could be prohibited from exchanging competitively sensitive salary data and issuing wage “guidance” that serves to anchor pay at artificially low levels. These reforms would restore the bargaining power of individual veterinarians and force employers to compete for labor based on the merits of the compensation and benefits they offer. It would transform The Match from an instrument of collusion into a genuine tool of market efficiency.
This Is the System Working as Intended
To view the Veterinary Match Program as a “failure” is to misunderstand its purpose from a neoliberal capitalist perspective. Judged by the goal of maximizing employer power and minimizing labor costs, the system described in the lawsuit is an unqualified success. It has effectively created a captive labor pool of highly skilled professionals and compelled them to work for wages that are shockingly low.
The system achieves several key capitalist objectives. It eliminates wage inflation by preventing competition among employers. It enhances profit margins by drastically reducing one of the most significant business expenses: skilled labor. And it ensures a constant, predictable supply of workers for the most grueling, entry-level professional roles.
The resulting harm—the debt, the depression, the burnout—is not an unforeseen bug. Within a system that structurally prioritizes profit above all else, this human cost is an accepted and necessary externality. The Match Program is a system working precisely as designed for capital accumulation.
Conclusion: A Betrayal of Trust
The lawsuit against the American Association of Veterinary Clinicians and its co-conspirators is more than a dispute over wages. It is an indictment of a system that allegedly betrays its own. It tells the story of how the very institutions that educate and certify veterinarians then turn around and exploit them, using their power and prestige to enforce a conspiracy of low pay and diminished opportunity. The human cost is measured in decades of suppressed earnings, immense financial and psychological distress, and a potential degradation of care for the animals we love.
This legal battle is a critical test of whether the foundational principles of antitrust law can protect skilled labor from the coordinated power of corporate and academic giants. It challenges a model of capitalism that seeks to eliminate competition at every turn, rigging the game in favor of the house. The outcome will not only determine the financial future for thousands of veterinarians but will also send a powerful message about whether the promise of a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work still has meaning in modern America.
Frivolous or Serious Lawsuit?
This class-action lawsuit appears to be a serious and substantial legal challenge, grounded in detailed factual allegations. The complaint is not based on speculation but on the explicit rules and structure of the Veterinary Match Program itself. The core of the case rests on the program’s own “Terms of Service,” which openly prohibit salary negotiations and bind applicants to their matched positions—actions that are, on their face, anticompetitive.
Furthermore, the legal complaint provides direct evidence of the alleged harm. It presents clear data showing that wages for interns and residents within the near-monopoly Match system are dramatically lower than the wages of new veterinarians in the competitive free market. The combination of a dominant market share (over 90% ), an explicit agreement to restrict competition, and clear evidence of suppressed wages provides a strong foundation for an antitrust claim. This is a meaningful legal grievance challenging a significant systemic imbalance of power.
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NOTE:
This website is facing massive amounts of headwind trying to procure the lawsuits relating to corporate misconduct. We are being pimp-slapped by a quadruple whammy:
- The Trump regime's reversal of the laws & regulations meant to protect us is making it so victims are no longer filing lawsuits for shit which was previously illegal.
- Donald Trump's defunding of regulatory agencies led to the frequency of enforcement actions severely decreasing. What's more, the quality of the enforcement actions has also plummeted.
- The GOP's insistence on cutting the healthcare funding for millions of Americans in order to give their billionaire donors additional tax cuts has recently shut the government down. This government shut down has also impacted the aforementioned defunded agencies capabilities to crack down on evil-doers. Donald Trump has since threatened to make these agency shutdowns permanent on account of them being "democrat agencies".
- My access to the LexisNexis legal research platform got revoked. This isn't related to Trump or anything, but it still hurt as I'm being forced to scrounge around public sources to find legal documents now. Sadge.
All four of these factors are severely limiting my ability to access stories of corporate misconduct.
Due to this, I have temporarily decreased the amount of articles published everyday from 5 down to 3, and I will also be publishing articles from previous years as I was fortunate enough to download a butt load of EPA documents back in 2022 and 2023 to make YouTube videos with.... This also means that you'll be seeing many more environmental violation stories going forward :3
Thank you for your attention to this matter,
Aleeia (owner and publisher of www.evilcorporations.com)
Also, can we talk about how ICE has a $170 billion annual budget, while the EPA-- which protects the air we breathe and water we drink-- barely clocks $4 billion? Just something to think about....
