Who Is O-I Glass, and What Did They Do?

O-I Glass is a Delaware corporation with its headquarters at One Michael Owens Way, Perrysburg, Ohio. It is one of the dominant players in the U.S. glass container manufacturing industry, producing the bottles and jars that hold everything from beer to baby food.

• O-I required employees across a sprawling list of more than 600 job classifications to sign non-compete agreements as a condition of employment. These agreements barred workers from seeking or accepting work with any competing company, or from operating a competing business, for one full year after leaving O-I.
• The FTC’s formal position, stated in the Complaint attached to this Order, is that O-I’s non-compete practice constitutes a violation of Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, the law prohibiting unfair methods of competition in commerce.
• The scope of the non-competes extended far beyond any reasonable definition of “key” employees. Janitors, floor attendants, mold cleaners, utility workers, storeroom clerks, forklift operators, production operators, and maintenance helpers were all on the list. These are hourly workers handling physical tasks on the plant floor, people with no plausible claim to O-I’s trade secrets.
• The FTC investigation extended beyond O-I alone. The employee letter sent as part of this settlement explicitly states: “The Commission has been investigating the use of noncompete agreements by O-I and other companies in the glass-manufacturing industry,” indicating a sector-wide probe.
• O-I’s consent agreement does not constitute an admission that it violated the law. This is a standard settlement structure designed to let companies resolve enforcement actions without creating legal liability in private lawsuits.

The Non-Financial Ledger: What a Non-Compete Costs a Working Person

Picture a forklift operator at an O-I Glass plant in Ohio. She has been moving glass bottles around the same warehouse floor for six years. She learns the basics of her craft in the first three months. The rest of the time she is just keeping the line moving, getting paid somewhere near the median wage for her region, probably without enough savings to weather more than a few weeks without a paycheck.

She gets offered a job at a competing glass plant twenty miles away for two dollars more an hour. That is roughly four thousand dollars a year. For her household, that is a car repair fund. That is the gap between making rent in a bad month or not. That is the difference between her kids having winter coats bought new or bought at a thrift store.

She cannot take it. She signed a non-compete.

That paper she signed, probably alongside a stack of other onboarding documents she was told to initial and return, said she could not work for any company that competes with O-I for one full year after she left. She likely did not have a lawyer review it. She almost certainly did not have the leverage to negotiate it away. She needed the job.

This is the mechanism O-I built: not just for engineers who might walk out with proprietary furnace designs, but for janitors, clerks, maintenance helpers, batch operators, mold cleaners, and storeroom attendants. Workers who spend their days doing physical labor that any competing employer could train a new hire to perform in weeks. The idea that a janitor at a glass plant could meaningfully harm O-I Glass by going to work for a different glass plant is a legal fiction. The real effect is simpler: it keeps workers from leaving, and it keeps wages from rising.

When workers cannot move, employers do not have to compete for them. The pressure to raise wages, improve conditions, or treat people better evaporates because the workers have nowhere else to go without risking legal action. This is not a side effect. This is the point.

There is also the fear itself, which costs something even when it is never acted on. A worker who thinks they are bound by a non-compete may not even look for other jobs. They self-police. They stay in conditions they would otherwise leave. O-I did not need to sue every departing worker to make the agreement effective. The threat alone was enough.

Then, in early 2022, O-I quietly decided internally that these agreements were “no longer aligned with our talent goals.” That line appears in the letter the company was ordered to send to workers. It is a corporate euphemism that lands hard when you understand what it actually means: the company knew these agreements were a problem, abandoned them when the pressure came, and then took credit for the cancellation in the same letter where they disclosed the FTC had been investigating them the entire time. The workers who never got that better job, who never took the raise, who never started the small business they were thinking about, did not get a letter explaining what that year of suppression cost them personally.

The FTC Order forces O-I to send every affected current and former employee a letter. But what the letter cannot do is restore the wages those workers did not earn, the career moves they did not make, the businesses they did not start. The Order is future-facing. The past belongs to O-I.

Legal Receipts: What the Order Actually Says

The FTC’s Decision and Order, issued February 21, 2023 under Docket No. C-4786, is the operative document. These are direct quotes from that record.

“The Commission has reason to believe that Respondent has violated the said Act, and that a complaint should issue stating its charges in that respect.” — FTC Decision and Order, Docket No. C-4786, Preamble (February 21, 2023)

“Respondent shall cease and desist from, directly or indirectly, entering or attempting to enter into, maintaining or attempting to maintain, enforcing or attempting to enforce, or threatening to enforce a Noncompete Agreement or communicating to an Employee or any prospective or current employer of that Employee that the Employee is subject to, a Noncompete Agreement.” — FTC Order, Section II: Injunction (February 21, 2023)

“In early 2022, we decided that such Noncompete Agreements for these categories of employees are no longer aligned with our talent goals. We previously announced this change, stating that we rescinded and will no longer enforce our Noncompete Agreement with you.” — O-I Glass, Appendix B Employee Letter (per FTC Order)

“No later than 10 days after the date on which this Order is issued: (a) take all steps necessary to void and nullify all existing Noncompete Agreements and notify Commission staff in writing that all existing Noncompete Agreements are voided and nullified, once completed; and (b) not require any Employee who is party to an existing Noncompete Agreement to pay back any remuneration or otherwise to be penalized as a result of the voided and nullified Noncompete Agreement.” — FTC Order, Section IV.A: Compliance Obligations (February 21, 2023)

“The Commission has been investigating the use of noncompete agreements by O-I and other companies in the glass-manufacturing industry.” — O-I Glass, Appendix B Employee Letter (per FTC Order)

The Timeline: From Non-Compete to Federal Order

The sequence of events reveals how long workers were bound before any accountability arrived, and how the FTC’s investigation shaped O-I’s internal decisions before the formal Order was ever issued.

What Workers Were Told Versus What Was Happening

Non-compete agreements are often presented to new hires as standard, routine, and protective of “mutual interests.” The FTC’s findings tell a different story about who this paperwork actually protected.

Societal Impact Mapping: How Non-Competes Break the Economy Below You

Public Health

Non-compete agreements at industrial employers create documented pathways to physical harm by trapping workers in conditions they cannot afford to leave.

• Workers locked into jobs by non-competes face a well-documented phenomenon in labor economics: the inability to leave a workplace with unsafe or hazardous conditions without triggering legal liability, which means workers at O-I’s glass manufacturing plants who experienced workplace health and safety concerns had reduced practical ability to leave for competitors without risk of legal action for the duration of the non-compete period.
• Glass manufacturing is classified as a hazardous industry. Workers are exposed to high-temperature furnaces, silica dust (a documented lung carcinogen at occupational exposure levels), heavy machinery, and chemical coatings. A worker who cannot freely leave a plant has reduced leverage to demand safer conditions because the threat of finding competing employment, the basic economic ultimatum that forces safety improvements, is neutralized by the non-compete.
• The FTC’s finding that the agreements “restrict job mobility” applies directly to the dynamic of workers staying in roles with hazardous exposure rather than accepting offers from competing employers, because that acceptance would violate their agreement. The health cost of that immobility is real and ongoing for workers in the affected titles, which include plant engineers, quality technicians, maintenance mechanics, furnace operators, and batch workers.

Economic Inequality

The wage-suppression mechanism of non-compete agreements operates most brutally on the workers least equipped to fight it.

• Economic research consistently shows that non-compete agreements reduce wages by an estimated 3 to 14 percent for affected workers compared to equivalent workers not bound by such agreements. For an hourly plant worker earning $45,000 per year, a 10 percent suppression equals $4,500 annually in wages never earned. Over a five-year tenure, that is $22,500 extracted from a working-class household and retained as labor cost savings by the employer.
• O-I’s non-compete list included roles such as storeroom attendants, utility workers, janitors, maintenance helpers, and batch unloaders. These are among the lowest-paid titles in any manufacturing environment. These workers have the least ability to negotiate around a non-compete, the least access to legal counsel to challenge one, and the fewest financial reserves to survive the one-year restriction period if they leave. The non-compete functions as a poverty trap: the people it harms most are the people with the least power to escape it.
• The FTC noted the agreements affect workers “previously employed by” O-I, meaning workers who had already left the company were still bound. A former O-I employee who was laid off, downsized, or fired could find themselves legally barred from their only industry for a full year, with no income from O-I and no ability to take work from any competitor. The non-compete does not expire when the company’s obligation to the worker ends.
• The sector-wide investigation signals that if multiple glass manufacturers used similar agreements simultaneously, the suppressive effect on wages was compounding: workers could not easily exit from any employer in the industry to a competitor without risking legal action. This creates a de facto wage floor that no competitive bidding between employers can overcome.
• The Order’s 20-year prohibition is partly forward-looking because of this sector-wide dynamic. The FTC is not only addressing O-I’s historical conduct; it is trying to prevent the industry from reconstituting the same suppressive structure once regulatory attention moves elsewhere.

Anatomy of the Agreement: What O-I Could Still Do

The Order prohibits non-competes, but it does not eliminate all post-employment restrictions. Understanding what remains tells you exactly where the company’s leverage is preserved.

The Cost of a Life: Putting the Numbers in Human Terms

The Compliance Machine: What O-I Must Do Now and for Two Decades

The Order’s compliance architecture is unusually detailed, designed to prevent the company from simply waiting out regulatory attention and reinstating the same practices.

What Now? Who to Watch and What to Do

The FTC Order gives workers tools, but tools only work when people use them. Here is who holds power in this situation and what pressure looks like in practice.

The Decision-Makers

• O-I Glass’s compliance obligations fall on its CEO (who must personally sign or authorize verification of compliance reports), its directors, officers, and all hiring/recruitment personnel in the United States, who are required to receive, read, and sign acknowledgment of this Order within 30 days of it becoming applicable to them.
• Any future Director, Officer, or Hiring Manager who joins O-I must receive a copy of this Order within 30 days of starting their role. The 10-year obligation for new personnel onboarding means this enforcement trail continues through 2033 for new hires entering those roles.
• O-I must notify the FTC at least 30 days before any dissolution, merger, acquisition, or structural change that could affect compliance, including the creation or dissolution of subsidiaries.

Regulatory Watchlist

• Federal Trade Commission (FTC): Primary enforcement body for this Order. Reports filed to ElectronicFilings@ftc.gov and bccompliance@ftc.gov. If you believe O-I is violating this Order, you can report to the FTC at ftc.gov/complaint. The Order explicitly states employees and their prospective employers can contact the FTC directly if they have concerns about compliance.
• Department of Labor (DOL): Has authority over wage theft and labor standards. If non-compete enforcement was tied to wage suppression practices (delayed pay increases to workers who could not leave), the DOL’s Wage and Hour Division is the channel to pursue.
• National Labor Relations Board (NLRB): The NLRB has taken the position that requiring workers to sign non-competes as a condition of employment can, in some contexts, constitute an unfair labor practice by chilling concerted activity. If you are a union worker at an O-I plant, your union can bring complaints through the NLRB.
• State Attorneys General: Several states (California, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Minnesota) ban non-competes entirely by state law. Workers in those states had additional state-law protections independent of the FTC Order. If you are in a state with partial non-compete restrictions, your state AG’s office is an additional enforcement lever.
• OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration): Relevant because non-competes suppress worker ability to leave hazardous workplaces. If O-I plants have documented safety violations, an OSHA complaint runs independently of the FTC process and can be filed at osha.gov.

Resistance and Mutual Aid

• If you are a current or former O-I employee who was party to a non-compete: under this Order, your agreement is void. If you have not received the required notification letter, that is a compliance failure you can report directly to the FTC. You do not need a lawyer to file a complaint at ftc.gov/complaint.
• If you are in glass manufacturing or any industrial sector: find out if your employer uses non-competes. The FTC’s investigation of multiple companies in this sector means O-I is unlikely to be the only one. Ask your HR department directly; the FTC’s non-compete rulemaking efforts (ongoing as of this Order’s issuance) are creating a national movement to ban these agreements broadly.
• Organize with co-workers: a worker who knows their rights under this Order is harder to intimidate. Share this article with people at your plant. Print the FTC-mandated notice (included in Appendix B of the Order) and know that if O-I is not posting it for new hires, that is a reportable violation.
• Support national non-compete ban advocacy: the FTC has separately pursued a rulemaking to ban nearly all non-competes nationally for workers below certain income thresholds. Organizations like the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and worker advocacy groups have been active in this space. Supporting those campaigns strengthens the legal infrastructure that makes O-I-style enforcement possible in the first place.
• If you are a prospective employer who was told by O-I that one of its former workers was subject to a non-compete: that communication is explicitly prohibited by this Order. You can and should report it to the FTC, and you can hire that worker without fear of an O-I non-compete lawsuit.