Another federal agency takes aim at noncompete agreements

The National Labor Relations Board is taking its own shot at banning noncompete agreements, making it the second federal agency to push back against them in 2023.

NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo recently sent a memo throughout the agency saying noncompete agreements, which typically prevent a former employee from seeking employment in a similar industry for a certain amount of time and within a certain geographic distance, infringe upon employee rights to take collective action to improve their working conditions.

That specifically falls under Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act, and Abruzzo stressed that threatening to resign to improve working conditions or actually resigning en masse as a form of protest are both hampered by noncompetes.

The NLRB's memo comes after the Federal Trade Commission proposed a rule to broadly ban noncompetes, while several states are doing the same. It's part of growing regulatory efforts to shape the relationship between employers and employees — a relationship that was already significantly evolving in the wake of the pandemic.

https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/news/2023/06/05/noncompete-nlrb-ftc-severance-nda.html