Non-competes have positively flourished in the tight labor market. I know a guy who works in PR who moved across the country to work for a company serving a completely different industry who dealt with aggressive emails from his former employer's legal team about enforcing the non-compete he signed.
I know a guy who was wrongfully persecuted for his non compete, it didn't even apply, but his former employers had friends in high places amd proceeded anyway. He lost his new job and it completely upended his families life.
The head of the FTC is known to be someone who wants to enact progressive policies. For her and her staff, limiting noncompetes is driven by idealism that workers should have more rights.
I believe that these changes are echoes of Bernie and other progressives getting lots of votes since 2016. They are now insiders in the government rather than outsiders, so they advocate for progressives to lead departments.
You know, this is the exact reason why the "left" v "right" thing is do damned obnoxious.
Good ideas are good regardless of political party.
Barring several wedge issues that parties exploit to maximize outrage reaction in order to gain power, most people are pretty closely aligned on stuff like this.
I feel like if you polled the US population on this, 80+ percent of folks would be in favor of eliminating non-competes, regardless of political affiliation.
I agree with you though, that this is one of those good policy items that's historically been a casualty of tribalism and "campaign finance" aka bribes.
It's not a binary, it's limited thinking to say that someone is "pro-labor" or "anti-labor". Even that choice of words, framing the narrative and the associated emotional response is deliberate - and misleading.
Each situation is different, for example, I think you'd be pretty hard-pressed to find a majority of "right" voters who believe that coal miner unions are a bad idea.
I think it'd be pretty easy to find a majority of them who believe that the NEA does more harm than good.
But it's a lot easier to just lump everyone together and demonize them, right? To find a few tragic examples of abuses to maximize outrage reaction, and make sure everyone is properly corralled into their tribes and casting the "correct" vote, so we can show those nasty out-groupers what's what.
In case you were curious, the distribution of political leaning in unions is a lot more complex than what you might think [1].
If someone asks me whether I believe in unions, depending on the day and how hungry I am I'd likely respond with something like "which union? which industry?", though I don't consider myself to be "right".
I am skeptical of laws that both protect and prevent unions, though. I think people should be free to assemble in whatever manner they choose, and to negotiate the same way.
I also understand that this gets really complicated when strikes or mass-firings threaten fundamental infrastructure and security. So, like most things - it's complicated.
A new congress that hasn’t received as many gifts from the powers that want to keep this. And probably the proportion of upper management of the FTC that has gotten such gifts is getting lower (or the gifts are getting weaker).
I was writing a long comment up top about this, but instead I'll reply here. Person with a background in public policy, especially around poverty alleviation efforts. I think that the removal of non-compete clauses has to due to with employees who you normally (at least I wouldn't think) of being subject to non-compete clauses... namely, service industry workers. Apparently 1 in 6 are subject to non-compete clauses: https://thecounter.org/biden-targeting-non-compete-agreement... This industry has been 'suffering from' high vacancy rates since the start of the pandemic because the industry has low wages, minimal-to-non-existent benefits, generally no paid sick days, advanced notice of your work schedule isn't provided (thus it becomes difficult or impossible to attend college or work a second or third job), etc.
For a group of workers who are generally less able to afford legal remedies to situations such as non-compete clauses I can see how non-compete clauses are especially damaging to this group of workers. (I'll show some hard data points on non-compete clauses by pay and by education level obtained in a few paragraphs.)
If I had to guess I would say that non-compete clauses are being removed now because there's a "worker shortage": 1M dead from covid and of that some percentage (50%?) of that in the workforce; restricted immigration - legal and otherwise - for the last 3+ years and before that a decline in immigration due to the polices of the former guy). Why the quotation marks around worker shortage? Basically, the service industry businesses want workers but hardly anyone wants to work in the service industry because the pay's bad, there are often no benefits, in many states you don't know your schedule until the day of (which makes planning for childcare, attending college, etc. damn near impossible), etc.
So if I had to guess this is the federal government's way of attempting to address the "labor shortage" in the service industry across the United States as well as allow people in white collar jobs to switch into new roles. I would bet that most folks who fall under the 'knowledge worker' class of employment know that their company's non-compete clause is pretty much non-enforceable, but ask your average restaurant worker who is under such a clause and I bet that they believe that the non-compete clause _is_ enforceable.
From this report from 2015, it looks like ~18% of all US workers are under a non-compete clause in their current role, with ~15% of workers without a college degree being under a non-compete clause and roughly the same percentage of workers with an annual wage of <$40,000 being subject to a non-compete clause (Rf. page 7 of 36): https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/226/Non_Compete_Contr... In that same document on page 16 you'll note that California, Oklahoma and North Dakota have the 'least enforcement' of such clauses. I suspect that the oil and gas industry in OK and ND enjoys not paying for training of employees, so if your employee can be trained at a competitor and then jump to your place of employment, full trained / ready to work, that seems to be what those states are looking for. (Yep, large swaths of ND and OK have over 20% of that county's employees employed in the petroleum extraction industries: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery... )
TL;DR: Fifteen to twenty percent of all Americans are currently working under non-compete clauses (with 1 in 6 food service industry workers being subject to non-compete clauses). Thousands of jobs are going unfilled in the service industry as well as in white collar, 'knowledge worker' domains. By removing the ability of employers to create and enforce non-compete clauses this should, in theory, 'free up' around 20% of the workforce to change jobs. In theory, most of these workers would be changing jobs for factors such as more flexible work schedule (advanced notice in the case of service industry workers; WFH for white-collar workers), benefits and sick days, and increased wages. My (admittedly cynical?) take on this is that by freeing up 20% of the workforce to switch jobs the federal (and state) governments are hoping that they can get away with any increased spending toward social services and instead can just tell people 'Well, go look for and get a better [paying] job! What's stopping you? Certainly not a non-compete!" Also, by allowing a 'great migration' into new roles the federal government can get a rough tally as to how many immigrants they'll need to let in via the skilled (H1B, NAFTA, etc.) and unskilled (EB3) visa programs; it's my opinion from looking at state- and federal-level labor statistics over the past 3+ years that the data is rather 'noisy' and by removing non-compete agreements it should make it easier to get a "closer to reality" tally of how many workers the US will 'need' to import to create and maintain full employment in various skilled and unskilled industries.