A laid-off Texan is stepping up to protect workers where the federal government won’t. Ric Davidson last week filed a motion to defend the Federal Trade Commission’s federal ban on noncompete clauses, a rule that the Trump administration has quietly tried to make disappear so employers can continue the abusive practice.
Noncompete clauses in employment contracts bar workers from taking a job in the same industry, as a way to ostensibly encourage them to stay put. Over time, the agreements have become egregious, forcing workers to remain in jobs they don’t want, not just ones with trade secrets to protect but professions like dog groomers and kindergarten music teachers.
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The Biden administration’s FTC under Lina Khan banned the clauses nationwide in 2024. But corporate interests immediately attacked, and the ban is now in limbo. Meanwhile, noncompetes have proliferated.
Davidson is one of the millions of workers they are harming, which is the spark that made him step up.
“I’m 62 years old with rheumatoid arthritis,” Davidson said in an interview with the Prospect. The contract stripped him of all power. “I had to either accept it, ignore it, or find another way to deal with it, which is why we’re here today.”
He’d like to tell his whole story, but the conditions of the noncompete agreement he’s currently bound by are stiflingly strict. He can’t even say what his job was or the company he worked for, though his legal motion says it is CID Resources, Inc., a manufacturer of clothing products for medical professionals, where he worked in distribution and logistics.
The FTC puts the number of workers bound by noncompete clauses at 30 million, almost 1 in 5 Americans.
Davidson signed a noncompete contract when he started working at his job, a condition of employment that wasn’t optional. “It was sign or no job,” he told me. For 20 years, he worked there, not thinking much about the clause. But this year, the company laid him off along with others, “and all of a sudden my career came to a complete halt.” The company decided to enforce the noncompete clause Davidson had signed, forbidding him from accepting another job in the same line of work anywhere in the U.S. or Canada for 18 months.
“I thought if I was being laid off, there would be some kind of compromise, and there was no compromise,” he said. On condition of receiving his severance package, CID required him to reaffirm the noncompete agreement, the motion says. He’s unable to discuss it further.
Davidson is now in his fifth month of forced unemployment. “My phone wasn’t ringing. I had leads, but potential employers don’t want to take the chance” of violating the noncompete agreement, he said.
During his time on unemployment, he wrote to President Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and members of Congress to explain that he’s not released from his clause until December 2026, “and for me that’s a death sentence,” he said. He can’t move to escape the clause; it’s too expensive. And even if it wasn’t, his wife is from Texas and they want to stay put. Plus, he’s on her health insurance and isn’t eligible for Medicare for another three years. “I’m in a situation I have absolutely no control over,” he told me.
Davidson used an artificial intelligence search tool to ask who was fighting noncompete clauses; it returned the Open Markets Institute and Towards Justice, a nonprofit law firm. He’s now represented by the latter, as well as law firms Burns Charest and Gustafson Gluek.
DAVIDSON’S STORY IS DISTURBINGLY COMMON. The FTC puts the number of workers bound by noncompete clauses at 30 million, almost 1 in 5 Americans. The Economic Policy Institute estimates the true number could be up to 60 million. Terms of the agreements can vary greatly, and typically include restrictions on where an employee can work, in what field, and for how long.
In April 2024, former FTC chair Khan finalized a rule banning them nationwide. The ban would increase average worker earnings by $524 a year and lower health care costs by up to $194 billion over the next decade, the agency estimated. It would also bring about 8,500 new businesses and between 17,000 to 29,000 new patents every year for the next decade.
In short, noncompetes “keep wages low, suppress new ideas, and rob the American economy of dynamism,” Khan said at the time.
The same day she announced the ban, corporate interests attacked, filing multiple lawsuits to block it. A federal judge in Texas put a hold on the ban last August. The FTC appealed the decision and won a favorable ruling, but Trump’s FTC chairman, the severely anti-worker Andrew Ferguson, decided to drop the defense in an attempt to let the rule die without having to undertake required rulemaking to repeal it.
“They want to kill this rule without having a political fight about it,” said Sandeep Vaheesan, legal director at Open Markets, which has been fighting noncompetes for almost a decade.
If the FTC wanted to formally rescind the rule, they would have to propose doing so with an explanation and accept public comments. When the Biden administration proposed the ban, it drew 26,000 comments, 25,000 of which were in support. Attorneys and researchers supporting Davidson said revoking would draw even more.
Ferguson doesn’t want to do that because he will get “justified heat for it,” Vaheesan said. “They know the political fight will be extremely unfavorable.”
THE CONTRACTS ARE A PRODUCT OF AMERICA’S foundational industry of human trafficking, legal experts and historians said. After the federal government formally abolished slavery in 1865, former slave owners continued to exploit Black labor through wage contracts that forbade workers from taking jobs with other employers. As in our era, workers would have to move to escape them, a prohibitively expensive proposition. Lawyer Mathew Leffler, who runs the law firm Armchair Attorney and a YouTube channel by the same name, described noncompetes like this: “How can I, your hiring entity, control you after you leave me? How can I get you to give me something for nothing?”
While the primary objective of noncompete agreements is to depress wages by robbing workers of choices that would bid up their labor, in instances like Davidson’s, who was laid off through no fault of his own, the primary benefit the company gains by enforcing the noncompete is not financial, but ideological. Noncompete clauses are ostensibly meant to keep someone from taking their skills elsewhere, but that doesn’t apply when a worker is laid off.
“There’s no real benefits, narrowly speaking, but it does send a message to all other workers that the employer is serious about their noncompete,” because they’ll enforce it even against people whom the company itself decided to force out, Vaheesan said. “It feels dangerously close to involuntary servitude.”
Noncompete clauses tip the balance of power between worker and boss so far toward the boss that it’s fair to call it oppression. And the Trump administration’s support of them puts the lie to any notion that it is worker-friendly, as do Trump’s other anti-worker actions, like attempting to fire thousands of federal workers, strip workers of their collective-bargaining rights, and crush the National Labor Relations Board.
“Our economy is based on the understanding of the free market,” said Rachel Dempsey, associate director at Towards Justice and a member of Davidson’s legal team. “People like to talk about the glories of the free market but these noncompetes make the free market work only in one direction, in employers’ favor and against employees.”
The more Davidson has researched noncompetes and talked with other workers, the more he’s come to see how many people they harm. He said the problem is so much bigger than himself and that he’s not going to stop fighting until noncompetes are gone. “Will it help me? I don’t know, that’s not really the issue anymore,” he said.
“Everybody’s stuck right now,” he continued. They’re afraid to move, afraid to work. Nobody’s winning. If we could make everybody understand how unfair these noncompetes are, maybe we could do something to change that.”