New task force, other federal developments target anticompetitive practices that impact workers

Federal enforcers remain focused on anticompetitive practices that impact workers.

Most recently, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) created a Joint Labor Task Force (JLTF) to “root[] out and prosecut[e]” a wide range of practices that the agency claims “negatively affect workers across all types of industries by limiting their mobility and ability to earn a living.” The Department of Justice (DOJ) and FTC addressed many of these practices in their updated Antitrust Guidelines for Business Activities Affecting Workers (Guidelines) just a few weeks earlier.

This alert addresses recent developments related to US antitrust enforcers’ approach to labor markets in the new administration and offers practical considerations for employers as they navigate the shifting landscape.

FTC Joint Labor Task Force

Stressing the importance of the FTC’s authority to protect “American consumers in their role as workers” and promising that “[t]he FTC feels workers’ pain,” Chairman Andrew Ferguson launched the JLTF on February 26, 2025 to coordinate resources across the agency’s competition, consumer protection, and economics units in order to combat “deceptive, unfair, and anticompetitive employer labor practices that drive down what [workers] earn for their labor.”

In his directive creating the JLTF, the chair focused on several types of anticompetitive conduct, many of which were also priorities for antitrust enforcers in earlier administrations. This reflects longstanding concerns about employer market power and includes conduct that generated previous enforcement actions, such as wage-fixing and no-poach agreements; sharing sensitive compensation information; and onerous noncompete agreements, which the directive identified as a “particular problem in rural areas.”

Other conduct identified as a concern for the agency includes collusion or unlawful coordination on DEI metrics, “which may have the effect of diminishing labor competition by excluding certain workers from markets, or students from professional-training schools, on the basis of race, sex, or sexual orientation.”

To combat these types of behaviors – which Chairman Ferguson characterized as “widespread” – the JLTF will have a broad mandate, and the FTC will prioritize both the task force’s work and coordination between the various functions of the agency.

Updated antitrust guidelines for the workforce and other developments

While the JLTF presents a new approach to these issues, it continues a nearly decade-long, bipartisan trend of federal enforcers’ commitment to using antitrust laws to protect workers from anticompetitive practices. This includes the FTC and the DOJ’s mid-January joint release of their updated Guidelines, which replace and significantly expand upon the agencies’ 2016 Antitrust Guidance for Human Resource Professionals. Despite their issuance in the previous administration, these Guidelines address many of the enforcement priorities identified for the JLTF.

The Guidelines “are intended to promote clarity and transparency for the public about how the [DOJ and FTC] identify and assess business practices affecting workers that may violate the antitrust laws” and specify that “workers” includes both employees and independent contractors.

These business practices include:

• Agreements between competing employers not to recruit, solicit, or hire workers (commonly known as “no-poach” agreements) or to fix worker wages or other terms of employment, both of which the DOJ has pursued as felony crimes.


• No-poach agreements between franchisees and franchisors that compete for workers.


• Exchanges of competitively sensitive information with competing employers, “even if companies use a third party or intermediary – including a third party using an algorithm – to share such information.”


• Employment agreements that restrict the freedom of workers to leave their job, including noncompete provisions.


• Other provisions – such as overly broad non-disclosure and customer/client non-solicitation agreements – that could harm competition.

In light of the Guidelines’ focus on several types of agreements between competing employers, the document stresses a core principle of antitrust law, which is that illegal agreements “can be formal or informal; express or implicit; and need not be written down or talked about at all,” and include “gentleman’s agreements, handshake agreements, or shared or mutual understandings.”

Two more notable items in the Guidelines include a continued focus on noncompete provisions and new guidance regarding non-disclosure agreements.

Noncompetes, which were targeted by a currently enjoined nationwide FTC rule in 2024 (the FTC recently requested additional time from appellate courts to allow the agency to “reconsider its defense of the challenged rule”), still may be the subject of individual enforcement actions, such as the FTC’s crackdown on three companies for their noncompetes immediately before its proposal of a noncompete ban in 2023. The Guidelines also stress that, in addition to antitrust laws, noncompetes may violate other laws, including the National Labor Relations Act, the Packers and Stockyards Act, and a number of state laws. For more on developments in this space, see our Noncompetes and Enforcement Hub.

Non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) trigger two independent concerns for the agencies. First, NDAs that “span such a large scope of information that they function to prevent workers from seeking or accepting other work or starting a business after they leave their job,” such as those that “prohibit disclosure of any information that is ‘usable in’ or ‘relates to’ an industry,” may be unlawful. Second, the Guidelines express concerns about NDAs “worded so broadly as to suggest that workers who report potential violations of law…or who cooperate with a government investigation, could face lawsuits and adverse employment consequences.”

This latter concern was reflected in two other recent policy documents, including the DOJ’s late 2024 updated guidance on its evaluation of corporate compliance programs for criminal antitrust violations and a January 2025 joint statement from the DOJ and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) about NDAs that deter individual whistleblowers from reporting antitrust crimes under the Criminal Antitrust Anti-Retaliation Act (CAARA) – a whistleblower protection law specific to criminal antitrust violations that President Donald Trump signed into law during his first term. The DOJ/OSHA statement suggest that companies using NDAs in this manner should expect less lenient treatment at both charging and sentencing stages if they are accused and then found guilty of antitrust crimes. Further, the joint statement notes that the DOJ may charge companies that deploy NDAs to this end with separate federal criminal violations.

Key takeaways

The FTC’s creation of the JLTF suggests federal antitrust enforcers’ intent to pursue investigations and possible enforcement actions based on a wide range of practices that fall under the human resources (HR) function. Many of these practices are addressed directly and in greater detail by the updated Guidelines.

Whether or not enforcement actions will follow remains an open question, but corporate compliance counsel and HR professionals are encouraged to watch the space. Companies may also consider assessing whether their businesses carry antitrust risks with respect to workforce practices – and determine possible steps to address them.

These steps may include:

• Narrowing the gaps between the HR function and antitrust compliance professionals. Companies may consider creating a “two-way street” to ensure both that competition compliance counsel understands corporate employment practices and HR professionals understand the antitrust risks across their function. Companies are encouraged to develop and deliver antitrust compliance training that is specific to these issues for corporate leaders and managers who are involved in any way with issues around hiring, worker compensation, and post-separation terms in employment contracts.


• Promptly investigating any internal complaints – including hotline reports – about potential issues.


• Revisiting and, where possible, eliminating the use of boilerplate language in standard agreements (or clauses within broader agreements, such as NDAs and noncompetes) that may elevate antitrust risks.


• Exercising the highest levels of caution in interactions with other employers that compete with you for workforce talent. Keep in mind that downstream competitors – those businesses that sell goods or offer services in direct competition with your business – may not represent the complete universe of your upstream competitors for workers. Forming an agreement with even one other competing employer not to poach talent from each other or to limit competition on wages and benefits may be investigated as a criminal offense. Be aware that even interactions through a third-party intermediary, such as sharing competitively sensitive information for benchmarking purposes, can present antitrust risks.


• Understanding that good antitrust hygiene around workforce issues may insulate your business from not only federal government enforcement action, but also from the activity of state attorneys general and civil plaintiffs, both of which could bring lawsuits for the same practices, using the same legal theories as outlined in the Guidelines.


• For multinational businesses, understanding that these enforcement risks are not confined to the United States. Several other competition enforcement agencies around the globe have expressed similar concerns and have pursued their own enforcement actions.

If you have questions about developments related to antitrust enforcement or restrictive covenants and how to approach these for your business, please contact the authors or your DLA Piper relationship attorney.