FTC Labor Task Force Reinforces Importance Of Avoiding Anticompetitive Labor Practices

March 7, 2025 – The Federal Trade Commission has announced a task force that will focus on unfair practices that impact labor markets, indicating that the new administration's approach to antitrust enforcement will focus in part on anticompetitive conduct that adversely affects American workers. The new Joint Labor Task Force will target measures that restrict workers' mobility, such as no-poach agreements, non-solicitation agreements and noncompete agreements. It will also focus on employers that agree with competing employers to fix employees' wages or otherwise use anticompetitive methods to entrench market power in a given labor market. Finally, the task force plans to investigate collusion or unlawful coordination among employers regarding diversity, equity and inclusion metrics, asserting that such coordination has the potential to diminish labor competition by excluding certain workers from employment based on their race, sex or sexual orientation.