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The Biden administration’s FTC under Lina Khan banned the clauses nationwide in 2024. But corporate interests immediately attacked, and the ban is now in limbo. Meanwhile, noncompetes have proliferated.
Ric Davidson is one of the millions of workers they are harming, which is the spark that made him step up.
“I’m 62 years old with rheumatoid arthritis,” Davidson said in an interview with the Prospect. The contract stripped him of all power. “I had to either accept it, ignore it, or find another way to deal with it, which is why we’re here today.”
He’d like to tell his whole story, but the conditions of the noncompete agreement he’s currently bound by are stiflingly strict. He can’t even say what his job was or the company he worked for.
Davidson signed a noncompete contract when he started working at his job, a condition of employment that wasn’t optional. “It was sign or no job,” he told me. For 20 years, he worked there, not thinking much about the clause. But this year, the company laid him off along with others, “and all of a sudden my career came to a complete halt.” The company decided to enforce the noncompete clause Davidson had signed, forbidding him from accepting another job in the same line of work anywhere in the U.S. or Canada for 18 months.
While the primary objective of noncompete agreements is to depress wages by robbing workers of choices that would bid up their labor, in instances like Davidson’s, who was laid off through no fault of his own, the primary benefit the company gains by enforcing the noncompete is not financial, but ideological. Noncompete clauses are ostensibly meant to keep someone from taking their skills elsewhere, but that doesn’t apply when a worker is laid off.
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