Adamas told the Federal Trade Commission in May 2024 that it never enforced its No-Hire Agreements — then tried to enforce one just months later to stop a customer from leaving.
Locked In Place: How Adamas Turned Workers Into Hostages and Called It a Contract
Federal Complaint Filed: 2025 | Jurisdiction: New Jersey & New York City
Five Companies, One Playbook, Zero Shame
Adamas is not a single company. It is five limited liability companies — Adamas Amenity Services LLC, Adamas Building Services LLC, Adamas Concierge LLC, Adamas Parking Services LLC, and Adamas Security LLC — all headquartered at the same address in Rutherford, New Jersey, all controlled by the same ownership structure, and all running the same illegal scheme.
These companies employ the workers who keep residential and commercial buildings in New Jersey and New York City running. The concierge at your front desk. The security guard checking IDs at midnight. The custodial worker mopping floors before dawn. These are the people Adamas trapped.
The trap was simple: Adamas buried language into routine service contracts that prevented building owners — and any company hired to replace Adamas — from hiring Adamas employees. If a building wanted to switch to a different provider, they would also have to abandon the staff who already worked there, people who knew the building, the residents, and the job. The FTC filed formal charges in 2025 after gathering enough evidence to call the scheme what it is: an illegal restraint of trade.
— FTC Complaint, Paragraph 13
Who Runs Adamas?
According to the FTC complaint, Adamas owner and CEO Jesus Muniz testified in proceedings before the National Labor Relations Board in April 2021 that Respondents “routinely included No-Hire Agreements in their service contracts with customers.” This is not a rogue clause buried by a mid-level manager. The CEO testified, under oath, that this was standard operating procedure.
Timeline of Adamas’s Illegal Scheme: Key Events
The Non-Financial Ledger
What Adamas Actually Stole From These Workers
The workers targeted by Adamas’s scheme are not executives with severance packages and stock options. They are concierge workers, security officers, parking attendants, and maintenance staff — the essential workforce that keeps residential and commercial buildings in New Jersey and New York City functional every single day. These are workers who showed up, learned the building, learned the residents, built relationships and institutional knowledge over years of employment.
The No-Hire Agreements turned that loyalty and experience into a liability. The FTC complaint directly states that these workers “suffer hardship if the building they work at changes management, because the No-Hire Agreements force them to leave their jobs in some circumstances.” Read that again slowly. When a building owner decided to fire Adamas and hire someone better, the workers who had nothing to do with that business decision were punished anyway. They lost their jobs. Not because they did anything wrong. Because Adamas wrote a clause that made them untouchable to anyone except Adamas.
The psychological weight of that situation is real and measurable. A worker in that position cannot meaningfully negotiate for a raise. They cannot threaten to take their skills to a better employer, because the agreement locks out better employers. The FTC specifically found that Adamas’s agreements deprived workers of “competitively significant information that they could have used to negotiate for better terms of employment.” Adamas did not just suppress wages. Adamas removed the worker’s knowledge that better wages were even possible.
The Ransom Clause: Pay Up or Lose Your Staff
The No-Hire Agreement didn’t just block hiring. It imposed a financial penalty on anyone who tried to hire an Adamas worker anyway. According to the FTC complaint, customers who wanted to retain Adamas employees after switching providers had to pay “a fee equal to a percentage of the salary of each employee hired.” The building had to pay Adamas money just to keep the people who already worked there. It is a ransom clause disguised as a contract term.
This fee structure did two things simultaneously: it punished building owners for exercising their right to choose a different contractor, and it punished workers by making their continued employment contingent on whether a third party was willing to pay a toll to Adamas. Workers became billable line items in a leverage strategy, not human beings with careers and families depending on a paycheck.
The FTC complaint is explicit that the scope and duration of these agreements went far beyond anything that could be justified by a legitimate business interest. The clause applied “during the term of the customer service agreement and for a period of time thereafter.” Even after the contract ended, the worker remained locked. Adamas’s reach extended past the life of its own business relationship — a ghost clause haunting workers long after Adamas had been shown the door.
The Lie That Made It Worse
In May 2024, Adamas’s own lawyers represented to FTC staff that the company “did not enforce the No-Hire Agreements.” That statement, if true, would have materially affected how regulators viewed the severity of the scheme. It was a direct communication to federal investigators designed to reduce scrutiny. And it was false. By late 2024 — months after that representation — Adamas Concierge LLC was actively using the clause as a weapon to prevent a customer from switching to a competing provider. The company’s lawyers told the government one thing. The company’s conduct proved the opposite.
Legal Receipts
Directly From the Federal Complaint — In Their Own Words
“Respondents’ No-Hire Agreements are anticompetitive because they eliminate direct, horizontal, and significant forms of competition to attract labor in the U.S. building services industry. These agreements deny employees access to job opportunities, restrict their mobility, and deprive them of competitively significant information that they could have used to negotiate for better terms of employment.”
— FTC Complaint, Paragraph 13
“Despite the earlier representation by counsel for Respondents to FTC staff, as recently as late 2024, Respondent Adamas Concierge LLC attempted to enforce a No-Hire Agreement against one of its customers as a means to prevent the customer from replacing it with another vendor.”
— FTC Complaint, Paragraph 12
“In April 2021, Respondents’ owner and CEO, Jesus Muniz, testified in proceedings before the National Labor Relations Board that Respondents routinely included No-Hire Agreements in their service contracts with customers.”
— FTC Complaint, Paragraph 9
“Respondents’ use of No-Hire Agreements is a method of competition that is unfair and has the tendency or likely effect of harming competition, consumers, or workers, including by: (i) impeding the entry and expansion of Respondents’ competitors in the building services industry, (ii) reducing employee mobility, and (iii) causing lower wages and salaries, reduced benefits, less favorable working conditions, and, among other things, personal hardship to employees.”
— FTC Complaint, Paragraph 14
“Any legitimate objectives of Respondents’ conduct as alleged herein could have been achieved through significantly less restrictive means. Among other terms, the scope and duration of the No-Hire Agreements are not reasonably necessary to achieve any purported pro-competitive purpose of Respondents’ building services contracts.”
— FTC Complaint, Paragraph 15
Societal Impact Mapping
Economic Inequality: The Wage Suppression Machine
The workers targeted by Adamas are overwhelmingly low-to-moderate wage earners in one of the most expensive metropolitan areas in the country. New York City and New Jersey are not cheap places to live. Concierge staff, security guards, parking attendants, and custodial workers in these markets depend on wage competition between employers to have any leverage at all. The No-Hire Agreement systematically destroyed that leverage.
The FTC is explicit: the agreements caused “lower wages and salaries, reduced benefits, less favorable working conditions.” These outcomes are not theoretical. When a worker cannot credibly threaten to leave for a competitor, employers have no rational incentive to raise wages, improve benefits, or fix hazardous working conditions. The agreements functioned as a wage-suppression mechanism with contractual teeth.
The scheme also targeted building owners, particularly smaller residential properties, who may not have had the legal resources to understand what they were agreeing to. The FTC found that the No-Hire Agreements “limit the ability of building owners to seek or accept bids from Respondents’ competitors due to the prospect of losing long-serving employees.” A small residential building board weighing whether to change contractors faced an impossible choice: fire the contractor and also fire your familiar, experienced staff, or keep a contractor you no longer want. Adamas engineered that impossible choice deliberately, using workers as human shields to protect its own market position.
The FTC charges explicitly note that this scheme impeded “the entry and expansion of Respondents’ competitors in the building services industry.” This is critical context. A competing building services company cannot grow its business if the workers it needs to hire are legally walled off by a competitor’s contracts. Adamas used the scheme to kneecap market competition across an entire regional industry, not just in individual buildings. Every independent competitor trying to grow in New Jersey and New York City operated at a structural disadvantage because Adamas had quietly made large portions of the available workforce off-limits.
Public Health: When Precarious Work Hurts Communities
Building services workers perform functions that directly impact public health and safety. Security staff prevent unauthorized access to residential buildings. Custodial and maintenance workers manage sanitation, pest control, and infrastructure repair. Concierge workers are often the first point of contact in emergencies. These are not peripheral roles.
The FTC’s finding that Adamas’s agreements created “personal hardship to employees” has direct public health implications. Workers facing job loss or wage suppression face housing instability, reduced access to healthcare, and the stress-related health consequences of financial insecurity. When Adamas forced a worker out of their job by making them untouchable to a new provider, that worker faced those consequences personally. The harm did not stop at the employment relationship; it followed the worker home.
The agreements also created perverse incentives around workplace safety. A worker who cannot leave — because the agreement makes them unemployable at the building they already work at if the contractor changes — has significantly reduced ability to report safety violations or refuse unsafe working conditions. Reporting to OSHA or demanding better safety equipment becomes a much riskier act when the worker knows their employment depends entirely on one company’s goodwill and that company has legally ensured no one else can hire them.
The Cost of a Life: The Math Adamas Did
The Three-Pronged Suppression: FTC-Identified Harm Categories
Severity ratings derived qualitatively from FTC complaint language: “causing lower wages” and “personal hardship” = High; “restricting competitor expansion” = High; “harming consumers” through reduced service variety = Medium.
What Now?
Who Is Accountable and Where You Can Push
The following individuals and bodies are named or implicated in the source material:
- Jesus Muniz — Owner and CEO of all five Adamas entities. Testified before the NLRB in April 2021 that No-Hire Agreements were “routine.” Still identified as the executive operator of all five LLCs.
- Federal Trade Commission (FTC) — Filed the formal complaint in 2025. Commissioners Andrew Ferguson (Chairman) and Mark R. Meador are identified in the proceeding. The FTC is the regulatory body to contact for updates on this case.
- National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) — Held proceedings in 2021 in which Muniz testified about the No-Hire practice. A parallel avenue for worker rights enforcement.
- Adamas Amenity Services LLC — Active respondent. 75 Orient Way #303, Rutherford, NJ 07070.
- Adamas Building Services LLC — Active respondent. Same address.
- Adamas Concierge LLC — The specific entity that attempted enforcement in late 2024. Active respondent.
- Adamas Parking Services LLC — Active respondent. Same address.
- Adamas Security LLC — Active respondent. Same address.
Regulatory Bodies With Jurisdiction Over This Type of Harm
- FTC — ftc.gov/complaint: Report anticompetitive labor practices and no-hire agreements in your industry.
- NLRB — nlrb.gov: File charges if your employer uses contract terms that restrict your ability to seek other employment.
- DOJ Antitrust Division: The Sherman Act violation cited by the FTC can also be pursued criminally. The DOJ has prosecuted no-poach agreements before.
- State Attorneys General (NJ & NY): Both states have independent authority to pursue anticompetitive labor market conduct. New York’s AG office has been particularly active on worker rights.
- OSHA: If you are a building services worker whose employer has used contract clauses to prevent you from reporting safety violations, OSHA’s whistleblower protection program applies.
What You Can Actually Do Right Now
If you are a building services worker in New Jersey or New York City, check your employment contract for any language that restricts where you can work after leaving your current employer. If that language exists, it may be unenforceable — and the FTC wants to hear about it. Connect with SEIU 32BJ, the union representing building services workers in the New York metro area, which has legal resources and organizers who have dealt with exactly this type of contract abuse. Local tenant associations in residential buildings can also put pressure on building management companies to reject contractors that use these clauses in their service agreements. The power to break this scheme is collective, and it starts with workers and residents knowing what to look for in the fine print.
The source document for this investigation is attached below.
There is an FTC press release from earlier this month about this no-hire controversy: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/12/ftc-continues-enforcement-action-streak-against-anticompetitive-no-hire-agreements
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