One of Biden’s pro-worker reforms has disappeared under Trump
Federal agencies that took a hard line against coercive labor contracts have retreated under President Donald Trump’s new appointments, and Democrats in Congress want to know why.
Rep. Summer Lee (Pennsylvania) and Sen. Ed Markey (Massachusetts), along with 44 other Democrats, sent letters to several agencies on Wednesday demanding to know what they were doing to combat the growth of “stay or pay” labor agreements. Such contracts require workers to put in a minimum number of hours before quitting or they will have to shell out thousands of dollars to cover alleged training costs.
As News themezone reported in a series of articles, the contracts have put nurses, pilots and even dog groomers deeply in debt for resigning before their agreements allowed them to. Many workers choose to stay in their jobs, foregoing higher wages elsewhere, for fear of being sued, which is why the clauses are sometimes called “training reimbursement agreement provisions” or TRAPs.
Former President Joe Biden’s appointees said the contracts were abusive and took a series of steps to curb employers’ use of them, including a proposal to outlaw them completely. But Markey and Lee say several agencies – including the Federal Trade Commission, the National Labor Relations Board and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau – appear to have backed away from that enforcement.
“Unfortunately, the Trump Administration has abandoned efforts to protect workers from anti-competitive practices – like TRAP – that suppress worker mobility and depress wages,” the lawmakers wrote.
The FTC under the Biden administration implemented a landmark ban on non-compete agreements that included a ban on TRAPs. But that rule stalled in the courts until Trump’s FTC refused to uphold it. effectively ending the ban.
Similarly, Biden’s appointees to the NLRB maintained that the agreements often violated workers’ rights and brought cases against employers when they believed the law had been broken. But, as Lee and Markey noted, the NLRB has withdrawn that guidance since Trump’s appointees were appointed.
via News
And while Biden’s Labor Department had compared the agreements to “modern indentured servitude,” Trump’s Labor Department has offered “no update” on the status of its enforcement efforts, Lee and Markey said.
“It also appears that your agency quickly resolved one of its key TRAP cases just weeks after you took office, but the terms of this settlement have not yet been made public,” the lawmakers wrote to Trump’s Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer.
It’s difficult to say exactly how many American workers are subject to TRAP agreements, but research suggests they have become more prevalent in certain industries. In a survey conducted by the National Nurses United union, almost 45% of nurses who had worked for five years or less reported being subject to such a contract, compared with only 9% of nurses who had worked for more than 20 years.
In 2022, a PetSmart dog groomer who quit her job told News themezone that she learned from a collection agency that you are owed $5,000 to the big chain for resigning before the 24 months specified in his contract. The company said she had to pay the alleged cost of her hairdressing academy.
Earlier this year, Colorado’s attorney general sued PetSmart over its past use of the contracts, arguing that the company had violated state law. PetSmart had “lured prospective dog groomers with promises of ‘free’ paid training,” the state alleged, “only to trap them and force them to stay with the company, even if they wanted to find a better job elsewhere.”
In their letters to several Trump appointees, Lee and Markey wrote that “workers deserve to know” whether federal agencies are doing anything to protect them from “these coercive labor practices.”
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