Not true. I lived through the no-poaching agreements in Silicon Valley which is close and if that's not close enough for you, before that I worked in market research in Austin and we absolutely shared a no-hire list, and not just with our other branches, but among competing call centers.
There were two other companies we regularly swapped low-skill call center workers with and the management teams of all three, I was on one, shared a list of disruptive and dangerous workers we'd had to fire and discouraged any of the three firms to hire. On our end, the list was in Lotus Notes and it was someone's job to make sure it integrated updates from the other call centers.
That was the late 90s and the list sharing started in the late 80s before I got there but it was one of the thing you learned about when you got promoted to management, check the list before the interview!
I started out on the phones and had many friends still on the floor when I got promoted, so learning about the list was a little bit disturbing, but the names I recognized on it from my time in our call center, had been escorted out by the police or carried out by EMTs.
That firm was wild. We literally took on 20 guys from the child sexual abuse convict halfway house to work the phones. Only half made the cut after the trial period and only three of them stayed on more than a few months, and those three were quite good, one making the "CEO" team which was the highly capable group that could hold a CEO on the phone for a 45 minute interview about, for example, printers and multi-function devices conducted on behalf of Dell Computers to see if they were making any headway eating into HP printer sales or whatever.
My point is that back in the '90s lists you say don't exist absolutely did. I not only knew of one, I used it, added to it, and I have every confidence that two other companies employing the same kind of people were using it as well.