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Comment by animefan | Hacker News Reader

For reference, "consideration" is the legal principal that contracts must be exchanges not just one sided commitments. E.g. if you had just quit and your employer asked you nicely to sign a noncompete, and you did sign, the contract would probably be invalid because you are getting nothing in return (I.e. no consideration) for your commitment not to compete with your former employer.

In contrast, the courts find "an offer of continued at-will employment is, by itself, sufficient consideration for a non-competition agreement." To me this is completely reasonable.

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I agree with you within the framework of at-will employment.

However, at-will employment is, IMO, entirely unreasonable. While Europe seems to have gone too far in terms of labour requirements, the US (and Canada, where I'm from) could do with more, such as introducing reasonable regulations surrounding hiring/firing.

Has Europe gone too far? Europe is a very diverse place, but in general, I think a lot of countries in Europe strike a very reasonable balance. The idea that a company should be able to fire someone on the spot over absolutely nothing, is completely unreasonable in an economic system where you need a job to live.

Introduce Basic Income, and I'm totally fine with at-will employment, however.

In any event it is a vestigial requirement in most US jurisdictions. Under the majority rule nominal consideration (i.e. $1) is sufficient, and courts won't look behind a declaration in the contract that it was tendered. So it is yet another boilerplate paragraph is added to every well drafted contract and that's that (again in most jurisdictions).

But, as far as I understand it, you still have to sign it or accept the 1$

Yes, you have to sign in order to form a valid contract.+ But that's a different part of contract doctrine than consideration. I'd argue consideration is a mostly vestigial doctrine, but contract formalities aren't.

In this case, I believe the employee signed, but then tried to argue the contract was invalid for lack of consideration. I don't know if there was nominal consideration recited or not, or what the Hawaiian rule on that is.

+ Well ... not necessarily sign, but an objective manifestation of intent to be bound, which most of the time means sign.

To me, it's not. They're putting more burden on you, for the same amount of pay, effectively decreasing your pay. Add that with the goal of non-competes being to make it harder for you to leave the company, thus lowering your bargaining power, and lowering your compensation.

Fuck non-competes, and fuck businesses who use them.

They are effectively giving you a pay cut, that's true.

But, you can quit, and if you do so without signing the non-compete agreement, then it has no force.

That's a very shitty amount of recourse.

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