Congress might, say, prohibit noncompetes across state lines, but would have a harder time making the case for a noncompete prohibition within a given state. Perhaps not impossible.
OTOH, there are Federal standards for labour in the US under the NLRA -- National Labor Relations Act.
Lay understanding of law.
Not that I support this reading, but it's been used to shake off commerce clause challenges for the better part of a century now.
They are paying you. You join the company on those terms. If you don't want to join, then don't join.
What they don't want you dong is taking all their IP, walking off and passing it onto a competitor.
It would be extremely naive to not understand that this happens all the time.
It's a tricky and nuanced problem, but it's real.
Bullshit, that's what NDAs are for.
Totally false and completely naive.
Most knowledge and know-how is not explicit - they are often learned.
For example - suppose you worked at Nuance, and helped develop their new AI/Neural Network speech recognition system. Everything you know about Speech + AI you learned from them, in that language specific setting.
If you went to work on Google's new Speech Recognition, which is AI-based - it would basically be impossible not to pass on know how and relevant knowledge. The application-specific skills are basically IP.
And the knowledge and experience you got from your previous job before Nuance ? where does it come from ? why would the buck stop at Nuance ? or the former company ? or the company before it ? your point is ridiculous. The knowledge I acquire, if it doesn't involve a company's secret is my own and no company owns it. There is no such thing as intellectual slavery which you basically promote. If you don't pay me I owe nothing more than the respect of your patents and other corporate secrets and those are covered by NDA.
Of course, the counter-argument there is that they paid you for your work, and that's why it's their property. It may follow that if the work is theirs and you can't use it, then surely your student loan in its entirety would also be their responsibility for just that reason.
Shame I have more important problems to solve in the meantime, that idea could be quite fascinating to work through.
If Nuance wants to pay me to not work for google for a long time - fine. As long as the non compete is fully paid that's fine.
Without pay from my former competitor, it must of course be completely within my rights to go to Google and develop in 1 year what took me 10 years at Nuance. That's what my experience does - helps me do the same thing quicker. That experience, and nuances "Trade Secrets" are more or less the same thing. Nuance paid me for years of failed attempts and dead ends. Google pays me (more) to not repeat them.
No. Those application-specific skills are called experience.
If you can't own them forever as slaves then preventing them from freely applying their learned skills for a period of time isn't coherent and logical.
+ Absolutely false. Whenever you work for a company, you will gain knowledge that is their property - almost always. It doesn't matter who/what/when/how you work for - that knowledge is theirs. Even McDonald's workers are subject to private info such as operating details.
+ "For you to somehow by dint of experience BECOME employer property in whole or in total is a truly bizarre perspective."
Nobody is anybodies property. If nearly everything you know about a subject is a trade secret, then you obviously cannot use that elsewhere.
+ "If you can't own them forever as slaves then preventing them from freely applying their learned skills for a period of time isn't coherent and logical."
Would you children stop talking about slavery?
If your skills and experience are tantamount to trade secrets than you cannot use them elsewhere.
The idea that some company is going to let you in on their $1 Billion dollars and research, so you can walk across the street and hand it over to another company 'because you think it's your right' - is not coherent or logical. Put yourself in the perspective of the manager of that IP.
What is protected is defined in terms of patents, trade secrets, and non disclosure. It looks like the long term prospects of software patents is extremely grim and neither of the later items can be so broadly construed.
Your skills and experience can't be owned by your employer. It looks as if you actually understand that none of the above are so broad and want to use non competes to protect some sort of moral right.
The problem is that such employers are 0.0001% of the population the freedom of everyone else and in fact the efficiency of the labor market as a whole is vastly more important than some sort of moral right for Bob the employer to keep Jim the employee from learning the trade and using that experience down the road.
Your perspective is antiquited and based on a belief in an entire social framework of mutual employee employer loyalty that was always mostly imaginary and now practically fictional.
It's highly likely that you have personal issues heretofore unexpressed wherein you feel badly treated.
Maybe you should elaborate on THAT.
P.S. Non-competes should have nothing to do with trade secrets; those should be covered by an NDA.
NDAs are nice, but there is no way to know whether a trade secret has been transferred to a competitor (if the competitor keeps their secrets secret).
The other problem with allowing NDAs but disallowing non-competes is that it provides a huge loophole, where businesses can classify all non-public information as trade secrets, thereby preventing the former employee from implementing any competing system (which will inevitably contain some non-public process from the previous employer).
Then sue if you have proof. What is not fair is to reduce a worker's opportunity to work when he isn't on your payroll.
The parent's logic would say that if someone does this, the only way to stop this 'bad employee' from selling all your non-public information is to pay (at least) their full salary indefinitely.
Then let them quit and go somewhere else. NDA cover corporate secrets, non-compete are anti freedom, anti competition and should be illegal. If your employee stops working then perhaps you should question the way you do business and how you manage your work environment. Usually it's a clear sign you treat your employees like shit. They should have all the rights to go work in a better environment whether it is at a competitor or not doesn't matter.
[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/bwp/please_dont_fight_the_hypothetic...
Do you realize that what you just said has nothing to do with Non-compete clauses?
In any case, I created a hypothetical to further the discussion; please address that one instead of changing the subject.
Do you agree that NDAs are flawed in the ways I described?
But that's irrelevant. The severance and non-compete contracts were two separate contracts, not linked in any way. The fact they had the same length wasn't a coincidence, but after they were signed it may as well have been.
And no, I don't agree that NDA's are flawed in the way you describe. If a former employee is willing to commit criminal fraud or theft then the choice of paper you make them sign isn't going to make any difference.
I'm not sure why nickff is mentioning trade secrets, when that's a separate issue, covered by NDA.
I have actually refused a job offer because the terms of the non-compete were so one-sided for the employer. The contract had things like one-way attorney fees, applied everywhere in the US for a year, wasn't limited to what the company actually worked on, and other employer favored terms. This was for at-will employment, and apparently I was the first person to refuse the job offer due to the contract. I wish more people would refuse to sign such biased contracts, as it stands companies can get away with the practice because too many workers allow them to do so.
I commend you for looking out for your long-term self interests, and agree that more people should carefully scrutinize their employment agreements. This does not bring me to conclude that non-compete terms should be banned, as they are simply one of many terms of the contract which should be priced appropriately.
<<"NDAs are nice, but there is no way to know whether a trade secret has been transferred to a competitor (if the competitor keeps their secrets secret)."
<<"The other problem with allowing NDAs but disallowing non-competes is that it provides a huge loophole, where businesses can classify all non-public information as trade secrets, thereby preventing the former employee from implementing any competing system (which will inevitably contain some non-public process from the previous employer)."
I am unsure what you mean by the following quote:
>"it's not like you can't"