FTC Just Banned 1 Major Way Bosses Control Workers. Here's How It Affects You.

When you get a new job, you might be one of the 30 million Americans who also signed a noncompete agreement.

A noncompete agreement stops you from going to work for a competitor or from starting up a competing business of your own, typically within a geographic zone and a set period of time after you leave a job.

You may not realize the consequences of what you signed until you try to leave for a new job.

In January 2023, the Federal Trade Commission proposed a comprehensive noncompete ban and opened their proposal to public comment. Thousands of responses poured in from professionals who shared stories of how these noncompetes forced them to stay in jobs with toxic working conditions, to uproot their families, and to stop serving their patients and clients.

As one Appalachia-based physician put it in their comment: “Providers with aggressive noncompetes must abandon the community that they serve if they chose to leave their employer. Healthcare providers feel trapped.”

From doctors and janitors to sandwich makers and yoga instructors, noncompetes have become one of the main tools employers across industries can use to control what kind of job an employee can take next.

They are not usually negotiable if you’re a new hire who wants to keep your job. Or as one car power-washer explained in their public FTC comment: “My boss said that if I didn’t sign before the end of the week, not to come in the next week… I’d like to start my own business but I would have to find another job and wait five years.”

The FTC estimates that one in five Americans are under these restrictive employment agreements right now.

But no more, according to the FTC.

On Tuesday, the federal agency set a historic precedent and banned noncompete