The Treasury Department has a new report out showing how anticompetitive behavior by U.S. employers has decreased worker wages by 20%, sometimes even more—a remarkable finding.
这68-page study, which is a collaboration with the Justice and Labor departments and Federal Trade Commission, puts four individual Biden administration agencies’ stamp on the argument that when companies compete, it’s the workers who win, not the companies, which is why many big employers believe it’s better if they just stop competing. The report breaks down the creative ways they’ve found to do this, from excessive occupational licensing requirements to simply sharing their employee pay rates.
But one of the most flagrant tactics is using noncompete agreements to block workers from taking jobs at rivals (and their cousin, no-poach agreements, which stop employers from hiring each other’s workers).
Noncompetes were originally created for jobs with trade secrets—proprietary tech or some innovative business practice that the company has a keen interest in protecting. But the Biden administration’s report serves as a reminder that, like other controversial practices that have spread lately—such as mandatory arbitration- 他们现在实际上在整个美国工作场所出现。
Studies show around one in five workers works under a noncompete today, and twice as many say they’ve been under one in the past. A recent paper估计它是收入增长的最高五分之一的21％，但仍然非常高 - 8％-5％-5。此外，有多个地点的公司更有可能使用非竞争，这意味着大多数低工资餐厅和杂货链，银行分支机构和酒店员工往往工作的地方。
虽然非竞争可以帮助顶级收入者赚更多的资金，但如果他们愿意在贸易中失去一些职业流动性，那么作者就会写下非竞争“似乎减少了低收入收入的工资和流动性。”低工资工人一般不谈判合同 - 他们经常在工作的第一天签署他们 - 或者与其他工人一起获得法律建议。
Fast-Food Chains McDonald，Carl的Jr.，Arby's和Jimmy John's陷入困境a few years back for their no-poach agreements, which banned one store from hiring another store’s workers, which of course suppresses wages. It turned out at least 32 chains had a version of this; 23 of them说过they had removed the clauses after public pressure and letters from 11 state attorneys general. But a recent study成立that one in six workers in the broader service industry is still bound by one.
The report notes that these contract agreements present extra hurdles, on top of employers’ already general unwillingness to raise worker wages. The CEO-to-worker pay gaphas widened even more在大流行期间，除了扼杀竞争和工人谈判权的就业规则和协议的层次，而且这一报告写道，这造成了一个令人担忧的情况，即“可能是美国经济增长的司机。和数据表明，向上推动工资的一种方法是删除非竞争：当俄勒冈最近结束了每小时工人的非竞争，他们的工资攀升2％至3％。
财政部的纸张来自脚跟sweeping executive orderPresident Biden signed last July to bolster what he called the “competitive economy.” It contained 72 different initiatives, one of which was a directive to ban, or at least limit, the use of noncompetes in hiring contracts. The order didn’t ban the practice itself, obviously, but directed federal agencies like the FTC to draft new rules. That’s a process they haven’t completed yet, but the report also encourages FTC chair Lina Khan to use the agency’s authority “to curtail the use of noncompete clauses and other clauses that may unfairly limit worker mobility.”
Biden has also endorsed a $15 minimum wage, and hiked the starting pay for federal workersto $15 an hour。But those anticompetitive contracts are an irritation to him.When he signed that order, Biden actually made a point to throw shade on hypothetical burger chains that demand workers sign noncompetes, stopping them from taking a better-paying job across town.“Come on,” he说过, “is there a trade secret about what’s inside that patty?”