Trump has just killed one of the largest progressive reforms in years

The Federal Commerce Commission has abandoned the historical prohibition of non -competitive agreements that it proposed only a year and a half ago, the result of the leadership change of President Donald Trump in the antimonopoly regulator.

He The agency said Friday that he was voluntarily withdrawing his appeals in judicial cases in which employers had challenged the legality of the non -competitive prohibition ended under former President Joe Biden. While the rule had been temporarily blocked due to the litigation, the agency’s support means that it is now effectively dead.

Non -competitive clauses prohibit workers from taking jobs in competing companies for a certain period of time after leaving an employer. Critics say agreements Keep low wages and Suffocated innovation By locating workers in their work, preventing their own businesses from eating or taking their talents to the highest bidder.

The prohibition of non -competitors was one of the progressive reforms of the Biden era, defended by the former president of the FTC, Lina Khan, who said that prohibiting agreements was about restoring the freedom of workers in the labor market. Khan resigned as a ftc chair about Trump’s inauguration.

“Today’s decision to get away from that rule is a surprising betrayal of workers, businessmen and the agency’s own mission.”

– Nidhi Hegde, American Economic Liberties Project

Trump called Andrew Ferguson, who had opposed the prohibition of non -competence, to be the new president of the commission, and tried to fire two Democratic commissioners before their terms increased. One of those Democrats, Álvaro Bedoya, resigned, while the other, Rebecca Slaughter, remains in the commission while she challenges Trump’s dismissal as illegal.

The commission said on Friday that he had voted 3-1 in favor of abandoning the non-competitive rule, with Slaughter, now the only Democrat, dissident.

The survival of the prohibition seemed unlikely as soon as Ferguson was appointed to direct the agency. When Khan introduced the rule, Ferguson said it went far beyond the power of the agency, and maintained that argument into a statement On Friday, saying that his “illegality was obviously obvious.”

The rule would not only cancel about 30 million non -competitive contracts, said Ferguson, would redistribute “almost half billion dollars of wealth within the general economy.”

That, in fact, was an objective of the rule, since the Democratic commissioners had argued that employers were illegally suppressing workers’ salaries through an anti -competitive practice.

Bloomberg through Getty Images

The agency estimated that the ban would increase workers’ profits by more than $ 400 billion for a decade, allowing them to change to new jobs or demand a higher salary in their existing ones. The estimated change in the richness of corporations to their employees helps to explain why companies and their lobby, such as the United States Chamber of Commerce, opposed the rule with such force and demanded to stop it.

Slaughter wrote in a dissent that the Republican majority had “sadly” “throw to the towel” about what should have been a historical reform that empowers the workers.

“Perhaps the agency hopes that, by dismissing the commission’s appeals and refusing to continue defending the rule in court, no one will notice that the FTC is choosing the side of controlling the bosses on US workers,” he wrote.

Vote For Ipsos Last year he showed that most Americans supported the prohibition of non -competitive agreements, although less than a third said they were familiar with the FTC rule. The agency said he received 26,000 comments from the public about the proposal, with more than 25,000 of them in support of a ban.

The American Economic Liberties project, a group of progressive experts that focuses on antimonopoly problems, said Ferguson had “exhausted” the workers and put on the side of commercial lobby to get rid of the rule.

“Today’s decision to get away from that rule is a surprising betrayal of workers, businessmen and the agency’s own mission,” said Nidhi Hegde, executive director of the group, in a statement.