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Becca Kelly Slaughter, a commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission, got her job back last Wednesday. She immediately requested a vote to restore the FTC’s “click to cancel” rule, which would make it easier to end recurring subscriptions. On Friday, she issued a dissent in the FTC’s decision to stop defending its ban on employee noncompete agreements in federal court. In just a few days, she had fulfilled the mission of the agency of protecting workers and consumers.
So by Monday, she was out of a job again.
U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts, in a perverse ruling at odds with a 90-year-old direct precedent, issued a stay of a D.C. district court’s order reversing the illegal firing of Slaughter by President Trump earlier this year. This effectively allows Trump to fire Slaughter for now, pending ongoing review of the case.
Trump, and therefore Roberts, doesn’t want a dissenting voice at the FTC pointing out all the ways that he is governing by and for the wealthy and immiserating ordinary people in the process. So Slaughter had to go, and quickly. Trump’s lapdog in black robes eagerly complied with the request.
The biggest example of this is the FTC’s surrender on the noncompete ban, one of the signature achievements of the agency under Lina Khan. Noncompete clauses stuck into employment contracts prohibit workers from leaving to join another company in the same field for a prescribed period. While originally used for top executives with proprietary information about businesses, they have more recently been imposed on pet groomers, fast-food workers, janitors, and more. About 1 in 5 workers have a noncompete agreement in their employment contract.
The goal is obvious: to suppress wages by preventing the free movement of labor that might create competition for their services. One could even say this is against capitalism as traditionally understood; economists in the mold of Adam Smith typically argue the market for labor is supposed to be open and competitive, to incentivize the most productive use of it. The FTC estimated that workers would gain $400 billion over a decade from this rule, in the form of higher wages.
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