Nearly 1,800 Pet Cremation Workers Were Barred From Ever Working in the Industry Again

Gateway, described by the Federal Trade Commission as the nation's largest pet cremation business, required noncompete agreements covering almost all of its employees, regardless of skill level or job duties, according to a complaint the agency filed alongside a simultaneous proposed consent order.DOCUMENTED The agreements reportedly covered nearly 1,800 employees, ranging from executives to hourly workers, and typically prohibited them from working anywhere in the pet cremation service industry, anywhere in the United States.DOCUMENTED

The case represents one of the FTC's first enforcement actions to emerge from its Joint Labor Task Force, formed in February 2025 to target deceptive, unfair, and anticompetitive practices affecting labor markets.DOCUMENTED

What the complaint alleges

The FTC's complaint alleges that Gateway's noncompete agreements are anticompetitive because they unfairly altered the bargaining position between the company and its employees, while also suppressing competition by likely impeding the entry or expansion of competing pet cremation services businesses.DOCUMENTED The agreements also, according to the complaint, discouraged Gateway employees from starting their own competing businesses — an effect the agency treats as a distinct anticompetitive harm from restrictions on employees simply moving to an existing competitor.DOCUMENTED

What makes the Gateway case notable within the broader universe of noncompete enforcement is the breadth of coverage: the agreements reportedly applied to nearly 1,800 employees across all levels of the organization, not merely to senior executives or employees with access to specialized trade secrets, the traditional justification companies have offered for noncompete restrictions.REVIEWED An hourly worker involved in the physical operations of a pet cremation facility has little plausible access to competitively sensitive proprietary information that a noncompete would meaningfully protect, making the blanket application of the restriction across the entire workforce difficult to justify on traditional trade-secret grounds.

The Joint Labor Task Force's approach

Following the FTC's 2024 rule attempting to ban nearly all noncompete agreements nationwide, which was later vacated in federal court, the agency shifted toward a case-by-case enforcement approach under its Joint Labor Task Force rather than pursuing a blanket regulatory ban.REVIEWED Daniel Guarnera, Director of the FTC's Bureau of Competition, said the Commission “will stand up for workers and ensure that they receive all the benefits that flow from robust competition between employers,” describing antitrust laws as protecting workers from noncompete agreements that prevent them from switching to better-paying jobs or starting their own businesses.DOCUMENTED

Why pet cremation, specifically, drew attention

Pet cremation is a fragmented, largely local service industry where a single regional or national operator gaining outsized market share through workforce lock-in, rather than through superior service or pricing, can meaningfully affect grieving pet owners' options in a given area.REVIEWED A former Gateway employee barred from working anywhere in the industry nationwide, rather than merely within a limited geographic radius of their prior position, would in practice be forced to leave the pet cremation field entirely to find work — a restriction regulators concluded went well beyond what any legitimate business interest could justify for the bulk of the covered workforce.

What the settlement requires

Under the proposed consent order, Gateway is required to stop enforcing the noncompete agreements against its nearly 1,800 covered employees, freeing them to seek employment with competitors or to start competing businesses of their own without the threat of legal action from their former employer.DOCUMENTED The FTC has cited the Gateway case, alongside similar actions against pest-control company Rollins and building-services contractor Adamas Amenity Services, as part of a broader pattern of noncompete enforcement actions the Trump-Vance FTC has pursued through the Labor Task Force.DOCUMENTED

The noncompete agreements applied to nearly 1,800 employees — from executives down to hourly workers with no plausible access to competitively sensitive information.

Why the case matters

For workers in any industry bound by a noncompete agreement, the Gateway case illustrates the specific factual pattern the FTC's Labor Task Force has targeted for enforcement: broad, company-wide noncompete coverage applied regardless of role or seniority, rather than narrowly tailored restrictions limited to employees with genuine access to trade secrets or client relationships.

What workers freed from a noncompete can now do

For the roughly 1,800 employees previously covered by Gateway's noncompete agreement, the settlement's practical effect is to remove a legal barrier that may have discouraged them from applying to competing pet cremation businesses or exploring self-employment, even when they had no realistic prospect of ever being sued over it.REVIEWED Research on noncompete enforcement broadly has found that the mere existence of a signed agreement, regardless of whether a company would actually pursue legal action to enforce it, measurably suppresses workers' willingness to seek outside opportunities — meaning the settlement's benefit to affected workers likely extends well beyond the smaller subset who might otherwise have faced direct legal action for leaving.

How the pet services industry may change as a result

With Gateway's noncompete restrictions lifted, competing and startup pet cremation businesses gain access to a pool of experienced workers who were previously barred from joining them, a shift that could meaningfully increase competition in local markets where Gateway's scale had made it difficult for smaller, independent operators to hire away trained staff.REVIEWED That competitive dynamic is precisely the outcome the FTC's Labor Task Force has identified as its underlying goal in noncompete enforcement: not simply freeing individual workers from a specific contractual restriction, but restoring the broader competitive pressure that noncompete agreements, applied at this scale, had suppressed across an entire regional or national service market.

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