Professor Samantha Prince presents at the Colloquium on Scholarship in Employment and Labor Law

CARLISLE, Pa.—On September 19, 2025, Professor Samantha Prince presented her work-in-progress article entitled “The Power That Binds: Handcuffing American Workers” at the 20^th Annual Colloquium on Scholarship in Employment and Labor Law (COSELL) at the Seton Hall Law School.

She presented ways that employers “handcuff” their workers via contracts and employee benefit plans and through invisible means. Examples of contractual bindings include non-competes, moonlighting restrictions, stay-or-pay schemes, and some bonus structures. Examples of employee benefit plan bindings include incentive stock options and certain retirement plan provisions, such as delayed participation, vesting schedules, and loan repayments. Non-poaching agreements between employers serve as invisible bindings because the employees do not even know about them.

Her presentation illuminated myriad ways that employers exert power via this handcuffing and the harms that employees experience as a result.

Prince has criticized retirement plan provisions that serve to stifle the ability of employees to accumulate retirement wealth in “Megacompany Employee Churn Meets 401(k) Vesting Schedules: A Sabotage on Workers’ Retirement Wealth,” published by Yale Law & Policy Review; “The Effects of 401(k) Vesting Schedules—in Numbers,” published by The Yale Law Journal Forum; “Benefits Transparency,” published by Marquette Law Review (where she called for more transparency through mandatory disclosure of 401(k) plan details); and “Benefits Washing,” published by the Georgetown Law Journal Online (where she showed examples of companies that “wash” their 401(k) plan details, including vesting schedules). She has also called for the elimination of vesting schedule use in her forthcoming article, “Vesting Villainy: The Call to Ban 401(k) Vesting Schedules,” to be published by the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Business Law.

She also responded to the FTC’s previous call for comment regarding banning non-competes.

This new work will more broadly contextualize her knowledge on contractual and employee benefit plan provisions within the framework of existing employer-employee power imbalance, information asymmetries, and employer privilege.

Professor Samantha Prince is an associate professor of law. She has a Master of Laws in Taxation from Georgetown University Law Center and was a partner in a regional law firm where she handled transactional matters that ranged from an initial public offering to regular representation of a publicly traded company. A significant part of her practice was in employee benefits, including retirement plan design and operation. Her expertise from practice has fueled her research, enabling her to become an expert on 401(k) vesting schedules, employee benefits transparency, and gig work. In practice, most of her clients were small- to medium-sized businesses and entrepreneurs, including start-ups. Professor Prince brought her practice knowledge to the Law School and established the Penn State Dickinson Law entrepreneurship program. She is an advisor for the Entrepreneurship Law Certificate that is available to students and is the founder and moderator of the Inside Entrepreneurship Law blog.