The clause was short and appeared in every McDonald's franchise agreement in the United States. Each operator undertook not to hire a person employed by another franchisee - or by McDonald's itself - until six months after that person's departure. This is what is known as a non-solicitation clause, or no-poach clause.
What the clause produces
Leinani Deslandes had worked since 2009 in a franchised restaurant in Florida. In 2015, she sought to join another, better-paid McDonald's restaurant. The clause prevented her. On 28 June 2017, she brought a class action before the federal court for the Northern District of Illinois, on the basis of section 1 of the Sherman Act, the US antitrust law.
The economic reasoning relied on is that of monopsony: where an agreement between sellers raises prices, an agreement between employers lowers wages, by eliminating competition for labour.
The withdrawal of the clause, then the agreements with the States
McDonald's stated in its court filings that it had stopped imposing the clause in 2017. On 12 July 2018, the company signed a binding agreement with the Attorney General of Washington State, Bob Ferguson, filed with the King County court: the clause had to be removed within sixty days from the contracts of the establishments in the State, and no longer enforced. Ferguson then stated:
“Corporations should compete for workers just as they compete for customers. They cannot rig the market to keep wages low.”Bob Ferguson, Attorney General of Washington State, 12 July 2018 - original in English
The initiative, later extended to other brands, eventually covered 237 franchisors. To avoid a frequent confusion: the multi-state settlements concluded in 2019 under the aegis of Massachusetts targeted Dunkin', Arby's, Five Guys and Little Caesars - McDonald's is not among them, having already settled the previous year.
The proceedings: dismissed, then revived, then ended
Before the court, the case went through three stages.
- 28 July 2021: Judge Jorge L. Alonso refused to certify the class action.
- 28 June 2022: he granted McDonald's judgment on the pleadings. The clause, he held, was ancillary to the franchise agreement; it therefore fell under the “rule of reason” and not automatic illegality, and in the absence of any allegation of market power, the complaint failed.
- 25 August 2023: the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, in an opinion by Judge Frank Easterbrook, vacated that judgment and remanded the case.
The court did not say that the clause was illegal. It said that the trial judge had dismissed the hypothesis of per se illegality too early, and that the defence based on the ancillary nature of the clause could not be decided at that stage. One passage attracted particular attention:
“One problem with this approach is that it treats benefits to consumers (increased output) as justifying detriments to workers (monopsony pricing). That's not right.”Judge Frank Easterbrook, Deslandes v. McDonald's USA, 7th Circuit, 25 August 2023 - original in English
McDonald's asked the Supreme Court to take up the case; on 18 March 2024, it declined. The proceedings therefore resumed before the court - then stopped abruptly: on 24 December 2025, the parties filed a stipulation of dismissal and the consolidated Deslandes and Turner cases were dismissed with prejudice. No amount and no settlement terms were disclosed.
It is therefore necessary to be precise: McDonald's was never found liable in this case, and no court ruled the clause illegal. What is established is that the clause existed in all US franchise agreements, that the company stopped imposing it in 2017, that it undertook to an attorney general to no longer enforce it, and that a federal court of appeals considered that the question deserved to be examined.
What this says about the franchise agreement
The case sheds light on a structural point: the franchise agreement does not only govern the relationship between the head of the network and the operator. It has effects on third parties - here, the franchisees' employees, who are not parties to it. It is the same mechanism of the network's control over what happens in the restaurants found in the scalding coffee case, where the imposed temperature was at issue, and which is organised by the very architecture of the contract.
The Antibes case file, for its part, documents this question from the angle of the room for manoeuvre left to the franchisee, notably in the PME & Affaires survey on independence and dependence.