Of all employees in the country, certainly less than 7% actually have ever cast a vote in favor of the company that employs them.
100% of people who accepted a job accepted the job...
'Plenty of prisons,' said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.
'And the Union workhouses.' demanded Scrooge. 'Are they still in operation?'
> The whip which brings us to Lowell is NECESSITY. We must have money; a father's debts are to be paid, an aged mother to be supported, a brother's ambition to be aided, and so the factories are supplied. Is this to act from free will? When a man is starving he is compelled to pay his neighbor, who happens to have bread, the most exorbitant price for it, and his neighbor may appease his conscience, if conscience he chance to have, by the reflection that it is altogether a voluntary bargain. Is any one such a fool as to suppose that out of six thousand factory girls of Lowell, sixty would be there if they could help it? Everybody knows that it is necessity alone, in some form or other, that takes us to Lowell and keeps us there. Is this freedom? To my mind it is slavery quite as really as any in Turkey or Carolina. It matters little as to the fact of slavery, whether the slave be compelled to his task by the whip of the overseer or the wages of the Lowell Corporation. In either case it is not free will, leading the laborer to work, but an outward necessity that puts free will out of the question.
-- Sarah Bagley, 1845
Once I walked away from a contract where they refused to remove the 1-year non-compete.
Another time I worked for a for a startup which had started out as an open source/volunteer project. After a big disagreement about the contract with the lawyer, the principal investor told me to 'sign the contract I wanted.' I refused to write my own contract and insisted the lawyer stop being insane and send me a contract without the non-compete section. She never did, but I started getting paid.
It worked out. The startup failed, I gutted the two commits that weren't mine and back-ported all the changes to the OSS version, keeping it all GPLv3.
TL;DR I accepted a job without accepting a job contract.
I think it's fair to say that very few people have the savvy to know that offer terms are negotiable, and further that very few people are employed in high-demand careers where they can negotiate their employment terms 1:1.
The companies have information asymmetry on their side, since these negotiations are performed sequentially and in private. Mathematically, the Nash Equilibrium looks very different for n sequential negotiations of "who will sign this non-compete?" vs a single all-or-nothing negotiation where the company ends up with <n|zero> employees.