Trump FTC Launching Task Force Focused On Corporate Labor Harms

The Federal Trade Commission is creating a task force to investigate corporate behavior that harms workers in ways that violate antitrust and consumer protection laws, Chairman Andrew Ferguson said Monday.

“One of the ways we combat inflation is making sure that wages stay up,” Ferguson said during an event on Capitol Hill hosted by the Washington Reporter and the Coalition for App Fairness. “One of the ways the FTC is going to focus on this very intentionally is making sure that unfair competition or deception or unfairness do not suppress Americans wages.”

“This is going to be one of the top priorities of the Trump-Vance FTC,” Ferguson added.

Ferguson said the FTC will this week launch the “labor markets task force,” with mandates for the agency’s bureaus to work together in scrutinizing the issue. He listed noncompete agreements, as well as no-hire and no-poach contracts, as areas of focus.

The comments came during one of Ferguson’s first public appearances since President Donald Trump appointed him as the head of the commission upon his Jan. 20 inauguration.

Ferguson’s remarks show some alignment with the Biden administration’s antitrust enforcers, which sought to devote more resources to blocking anticompetitive conduct in labor markets.

The FTC last April adopted a rule imposing a near-total ban on worker noncompetes, which was blocked from going into effect in court and remains subject to litigation.

The Justice Department also in 2021 brought its first labor-focused merger lawsuit—a successful challenge of Penguin Random House’s $2.18 billion purchase of Simon & Schuster.

Ferguson, who as an FTC commissioner voted against issuing the noncompete rule, said Monday that he thought the rule overstepped the agency’s constitutional authority. But he said the agency under his leadership would be “on the lookout for noncompetes that violate the antitrust laws, and we’re going to do something about them.”

“For Republicans of yore, this is a strange thing to hear, but this is the working person’s party now,” Ferguson said. “At the FTC, we are going to take incredibly seriously the fact that the antitrust laws protect competition in labor markets and that the consumer protection laws protect a huge array of conduct that Americans engage in to make a living.”

The move by Ferguson follows his announcement last week that he will follow tougher merger review rules adopted by Biden antitrust leaders in 2023, which came as a surprise to some corporate dealmakers anticipating a lighter touch in enforcement.

Speaking about his philosophy, Ferguson said he wants to enforce the antitrust laws “vigorously and aggressively.” If a merger violates antitrust law, ”you’re gonna see us in court,” he said, “and if we think it doesn’t, we’re going to get out of the way.”