- In his first public appearance as Federal Trade Commission chairman, Andrew Ferguson announced a task force to protect workers and hike their pay, breaking with Republican orthodoxy.
Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson announced the agency is putting a task force in place to investigate corporations violating antitrust and consumer protection laws that hurt workers earlier this week. And Ferguson has an unorthodox idea for dealing with the resurgence of inflation, which remains stubborn despite President Donald Trump’s promise to kill high prices on “day one” of his presidency.
“One of the ways we combat inflation is making sure that wages stay up,” Ferguson said during an event on Capitol Hill for his first public appearance since taking on the role, per Bloomberg. “One of the ways the FTC is going to focus on this very intentionally is making sure that unfair competition or deception or unfairness do not suppress Americans’ wages.”
“This is going to be one of the top priorities of the Trump-Vance FTC,” he added.
Ferguson’s statement flies in the face of classical economics, which holds that rising wages make inflation worse. According to that theory, espoused by everyone from college economics professors to Wall Street analysts, businesses that hike pay usually pass on those increases to consumers in the form of higher prices, which accelerate inflation. Ferguson’s apparent pro-worker turn is a nod to the more populist elements of Trump’s agenda and more aligned with typical progressive arguments for hiking pay.
The FTC did not respond to a request for clarification from Fortune, and the specifics of Ferguson’s plan remain scant. Trump, who elevated Ferguson to the chairman role, earlier this month bemoaned stubborn inflation while saying, “I had nothing to do with it.” Still, on the campaign trail, Trump promised to bring prices down on “day one,” but later conceded to Time magazine: “It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up. You know, it’s very hard.”
The task force would concentrate on noncompete agreements as well as no-hire and no-poach contracts, Bloomberg reported. This might not be something you’d typically expect to hear from a Republican administration—and it appears Ferguson is aware of that.
“For Republicans of yore, this is a strange thing to hear, but this is the working person’s party now,” Ferguson said at the event. “At the FTC, we are going to take incredibly seriously the fact that the antitrust laws protect competition in labor markets and that the consumer protection laws protect a huge array of conduct that Americans engage in to make a living.”
Noncompetes basically prevent workers from taking new jobs or starting new businesses after they’ve left an employer; the FTC under former Chair Lina Khan called these common agreements an “often exploitative practice” and decreed them widely illegal in a rule that is now being litigated in the courts.
Ferguson, who has been an FTC commissioner since last year, dissented from the agency’s move to ban noncompetes, saying the FTC had overstepped its authority. In his public remarks this week, Ferguson said the agency would be “on the lookout for noncompetes that violate the antitrust laws, and we’re going to do something about them.”
The FTC did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment on Ferguson’s apparent shift.
Khan’s FTC had also sued Amazon for monopolization and stopped high-profile mergers involving Nvidia, Kroger, and others. Corporations were anticipating a lighter regulatory environment under Trump, but Ferguson doesn’t seem keen on letting things slide.
The chairman wants to enforce the antitrust laws “vigorously and aggressively,” Bloomberg reported. If a merger violates antitrust law, “you’re gonna see us in court,” he said, “and if we think it doesn’t, we’re going to get out of the way.”
