FIRST ON FOX: Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., and Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., jointly introduced a bill which would ban companies from imposing non-compete agreements on employees who make less than $100,000 a year, according to the bill text which Fox News Digital has obtained exclusively.
“This is something that people should easily be able to get behind,” Khanna told Fox News Digital in an interview.
Khanna highlighted the bipartisan nature of the bill, claiming that Vice President JD Vance has previously referred to non-compete agreements as unenforceable.
“It’s something that, after this election, may actually be able to bring the country together. I mean what other issue do you have JD Vance, Rep. Luna, Ro Khanna all in alignment on?” he asked.
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If passed, the Workers’ Right To Compete Act would ban future as well as pre-existing non-compete agreements within 30 days of its passing, allowing workers who were previously beholden to such contracts to seek out new employment.
Khanna and Luna both argued that non-compete agreements limit American employees from pursuing opportunity and that the contracts hinder economic growth.
“Independent contractors and hardworking Americans deserve the freedom to continue advancing their careers and earn the money they deserve without unnecessary legal red tape standing in their way,” Luna told Fox News Digital in a statement.
“This legislation protects that freedom and puts Americans in charge of their opportunities and earning potential,” Luna concluded.
Khanna also pointed to the success of companies who have already done away with non-competes, such as KKR & Co., a private equity firm which prohibited companies it acquired from enacting a similar non-compete ban for employees making under $100,000 a year.
“They found that it actually improved the economic performance of the companies. It had no negative impact by not enforcing those non-competes,” Khanna said.
In an interview with Bloomberg, KKR’s co-head of global private equity Pete Stavros claimed economists say non-competes suppress wages.
A 2021 article from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis supports that claim, with the authors writing that “When Oregon ended the enforcement of non-competes for hourly paid workers, wages for those workers rose by 2–3%.”
Khanna said that he’d ideally like to push for an even higher floor for those exempted from the non-competes than the $100,000 threshold proposed in the bill, but wanted to start somewhere that could get meaningful legislation passed.
Khanna also pointed out that, thanks to California’s broad ban on non-competes, innovation flourishes, noting that Anthropic founder Dario Amodei would not have been able to start his business had his previous employer, OpenAI, contracted him under a non-compete clause.
“Something I’ve heard from the day I’ve been in Congress, one of California’s successes in innovation has been that we ban the enforcement of non-competes. So you can have someone leave a technology company and go to another technology company that allows for new startups, new innovation, and more competition,” he told Fox News Digital.
“So many people from Google left to OpenAI,” Khanna continued. “So many from OpenAI left to Anthropic. People leave from NVIDIA all the time to go to Anthropic to start AI companies, to start technology companies. Now, my view is these tech companies already have too much power. We need more competition, not less competition.
“But imagine if they were non-compete, you basically would have one monopolist in doing search, in doing AI, in building chips. I’m glad that at least you have AMD and NVIDIA competing,” Khanna said.
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“It’s bipartisan. It’s something that can bring the political spectrum together. It’s pro-innovation. It’s pro-growth. It’s pro wages. It is something that has worked in California and Silicon Valley,” he told Fox News Digital. “Anyone who knows the Silicon Valley ecosystem will say the non-enforcement of non-compete is one of the reasons for the Valley’s success.”
The Federal Trade Commission voted in 2024 on a rule to ban non-competes, but abandoned the rule after a federal district court struck it down.
Fox News Digital contacted Vance for comment.
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