Posts tagged noncompete
What NLRB’s New Collaboration with Consumer Financial Agency Means for Gig Economy Businesses
March 10, 2023 // If your business relies on gig economy workers, you may want to review your policies on monitoring workers and requiring them to pay for training and equipment. That’s because the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) announced on Tuesday that it’s joining forces with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to address potential misconduct regarding workplace surveillance, monitoring, data collection, and employer-driven debt. The agencies said they will share information to enhance their enforcement efforts and better protect workers in the gig economy and other labor markets from harmful financial practices. What do you need to know about the new Memorandum of Understanding and its impact on the workplace?
Op-ed: FTC on the Gig Economy: The Glass is Almost Empty
October 12, 2022 // The FTC does, of course, have a legitimate role to play in challenging unfair methods of competition and unfair acts or practices that undermine consumer welfare wherever they arise, including in the gig economy. But it does a disservice by focusing merely on supposed negative aspects of the gig economy and conjuring up a gig-specific “parade of horribles” worthy of close commission scrutiny and enforcement action. Many of the “horribles” cited may not even be “bads,” and many of them are, in any event, beyond the proper legal scope of FTC inquiry. There are other federal agencies (for example, the National Labor Relations Board) whose statutes may prove applicable to certain problems noted in the gig statement. In other cases, statutory changes may be required to address certain problems noted in the statement (assuming they actually are problems). The FTC, and its fellow enforcement agencies, should keep in mind, of course, that they are not Congress, and wishing for legal authority to deal with problems does not create it (something the federal judiciary fully understands). In short, the negative atmospherics that permeate the gig statement are unnecessary and counterproductive; if anything, they are likely to convince at least some judges that the FTC is not the dispassionate finder of fact and enforcer of law that it claims to be. In particular, the judiciary is unlikely to be impressed by the FTC’s apparent effort to insert itself into questions that lie far beyond its statutory mandate.