Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan doubled down on the agency’s proposal to eliminate noncompete clauses from employment contracts and fight junk fees.
The FTC in January released a proposal to prohibit noncompete clauses—which prevent workers from leaving a company to join a rival company within a specified period—in an effort to bolster wages, increase competition, and improve market opportunities.
“Our proposal follows extensive research showing that noncompetes harm competition and labor markets, creating mismatches between workers and firms and reducing wages even for workers not directly covered by noncompetes,” Ms. Khan said in a speech at the Economic Club of New York on July 24.
“These clauses also impede entrepreneurial growth, depriving new firms of access to talent and dampening competition in product and service markets as well.”
Ms. Khan estimated that restricting noncompete clauses in employment contracts would raise wages by up to $300 billion and slash health care spending by up to $150 billion.
“Thirty million workers had to sign noncompete agreements when they took a job. So a cashier at a burger place can’t cross the street to take the same job at another burger place to make a couple bucks more,” Mr. Biden said. “Not anymore.”
Critics say that this prevents low-wage workers from attempting to secure higher pay.
However, others have defended the use of noncompete clauses, arguing that businesses, especially in the tech industry, shield their intellectual capital by including this provision in employer agreements. In addition, experts purport that companies are willing to extend higher compensation to workers in exchange for signing noncompete clauses.
“A ban would risk falsely condemning procompetitive uses of non-competes and thereby reducing productivity and dampening the incentives to invest in trade secrets and to disseminate firm-specific knowledge widely among a firm’s workforce,” researchers at the Global Antitrust Institute at George Mason University wrote.
While this might be more common for high-salary workers, cashiers and line cooks at fast-food companies are more likely to face another provision.
The War on Junk Fees
A key scheme inside “Bidenomics”—Mr. Biden’s economic doctrine—has been consumer protection, with a focus on so-called junk fees.The White House estimated that so-called junk fees cost American consumers tens of billions of dollars each year.
“As Taylor Swift Fans can most recently attest, even buying a concert ticket is now rife with hidden mystery fees and risks of a system-wide meltdown,” she said in her prepared remarks.
Small businesses are also victims of junk fees, Ms. Khan said.
“Small businesses across the country find themselves squeezed—not because customers don’t like their products, but because they’re unfairly muscled out of markets by big players,” she said. “At the FTC, we routinely hear from businesses across sectors from independent pharmacies to local grocers about the arbitrary fees, discriminatory pricing, and coercive tactics that they face at the hands of large firms.”
But experts, including economists at the Cato Institute, warn that reining in junk fees could pose long-term challenges and could harm consumers by increasing headline prices and eliminating choice.
Mary Sullivan, a former FTC economist and visiting scholar at the Regulatory Studies Center of George Washington University, purports these initiatives would be “counterproductive.”
“Now, in fact, it’s quite confusing when the fees we are charging are clearly disclosed within compliance of the existing laws, that suddenly one person can interpret that a different way,” Mr. Reuter said.
“Consumers are understandably fed up with the increasing number of costly junk fees they encounter whenever they make a purchase,” said Jonathan Schwantes, senior policy counsel for Consumer Reports. “These fees are more than just a nuisance; they can add up to thousands of extra dollars every year for the typical American family.”
Lawmakers need to defend consumers from “unfair and deceptive charges” by approving a bill to stop “hidden junk fees,” according to the letter.