Even janitors have noncompetes now

This was probably for consistency across the country, since many of their employees are based at their California headquarters where all non-competes (except for a small edge case in the context of selling a company) are disallowed by law. The same law applies to Uber's California employees, which includes those at their HQ.

I don't know if they've subsequently added a non-compete for US employees outside of California, or if they have ever used one for their international employees, but I honestly doubt both.

I wouldn't be surprised if their contractors and vendors have worse legalese where the law allows, though.

Glad you followed up, interesting data point!

I once sat as a juror on a pretty nasty trial involving a contract where both parties disputed over the signature. We had to sit through days of testimony from professional handwriting forensics specialists over who they thought had signed a particular agreement. Was the signature valid, or was it forged?

In the end, it didn't matter. The two parties acted in such a way to form a different oral contract, and it was their actions which lead to the jury determining the outcome of the trial. The contract was a piece of the puzzle, but it's not the _only_ piece of the puzzle. One party acted in a way as to misrepresent what was in the written contract, and that was used to determine fault.

I just want to say that I'm super impressed that happened at all. Nice work!

HR drew up a new contract without the offending clause that very day.

Point being, if you don't like a bit in your contract, challenge it. They may just take it out to not have to start their hiring process over again. You have to be unafraid to lose the job, but losing the job is nothing compared to being sued over cripplingly onerous contract terms.

Its about decreasing agency of those with more useful skills but not much money to ensure more predictable returns for those with more money than skills.

i recently had a company try to have me sign a document claiming ownership of anything i create in the time i work for them; meaning the tenure

i asked for clarification and without flinching they asserted that, 'yes, that includes on your own time and your own hardware even in a field wholly disparate from the one the company was in'

i thanked the interviewer for having me in and explained that though i felt they seemed like a kind person the company they were representing was offensive and unethical

first time i ever ended an interview early

Non-competes and forced arbitration are the beginning of a new system of corporate feudalism. (Want to move? Too bad, you're stuck on the fief by law.)

What's that? Your lord wronged you? Well, appeal to the Duke and see what he says about it, forget what your peers think.

NDAs make it so that the ills and wrongs of society never see the light of day and so can't be appropriately considered by citizens at the ballot box. Kind of like it used to be a crime to speak ill of the king...Yay modern lèse-majesté.

The clauses attached to the Weinstein agreement signed by Perkins offer an insight into how egregious some NDAs can be. She was prohibited from even obtaining a copy of the agreement – she could only look at it supervised at a law firm’s office, a clause that also prevented MPs from acquiring the document. Ultimately she obtained the agreement in June through a personal data request. Its contents confirmed that she was banned from talking to a doctor, therapist or psychoanalyst about Weinstein’s alleged harassment unless they also signed an NDA and that she should not speak about the payment even if HMRC questioned her about it.

“If a therapist, for instance, broke the agreement, I would be held responsible for their disclosure. There were guns pointed from every angle,” said Perkins, who has since managed to rebuild her career as a successful associate producer.

OTOH, I've worked in and am pretty familiar with a particular branch of market research/consulting firms in the IT industry. I've been told directly by employees and ex-employees of a couple of the largest firms that people who leave to start their own practices or go to competitors are routinely kept from doing so. I personally know people who have basically hung out "on the beach" for a year for this reason.

So, in that case, those people basically couldn't go to another firm and do the same thing as they had been doing.

And are you willing to go to court and spend years and thousands upon thousands of dollars to not have that enforced against you?

Much like DNA, if you leave something around there's a chance a mutation might activate it.

Foxconn infamously took one of their employees to court for being a taxi driver and the case was quickly dismissed. And recent years all non competes cases in Taiwan are thrown out except for high level managers.

Right out of college, some guy wanted me to sign a NOLO contract that you'd use for hiring someone as a general contractor for your home. Walked away from that.

I almost bought some land where the developer set up a boilerplate HOA that restricted things like boats in a town where everyone has a boat... And my direct neighbor wasn't part of the HOA!

This was still not perfect, since the non-salary compensation at finance firms is a non-trivial portion of total compensation, but in my mind should be the minimum required by law for a non-compete agreement.

Historically, we (governments) have tended to write laws that constrain what employers can require, especially of low wage workers, because of the extreme power imbalance. Hence the existence of laws on minimum wage, overtime, mandatory breaks, paid leave, etc.

Then you utterly fail to support this thesis in any imaginable fashion. Most people can't survive on 25-50% of their current salary with current obligations.

Markets/relationships require information and agency to function efficiently.

It's damn near amazing that you presumably understand that consumer choice is essential for an efficient market for groceries and wrenches but you don't believe that contracts that interfere with employees choosing an optimal employer don't make for an inefficient labor market.

When you understand that ANY employer could maintain minimal turnover by paying a competitive wage/benefits just by the human nature of desiring stability it ought to be obvious that the only reason to desire a noncompete is so that you can offer less without losing employees.

I can think of exactly zero benefits to me, unless they’re paying at least 100% of my total expected income, including bonuses and other discretionary income.

They asked me to sign a contract with a clause saying that I'd assign them any inventions I came up with in the course of my work, sign anything reasonably related to them pursuing patents for these inventions and grant them power of attorney to do so on my behalf if I didn't do so promptly. (There was a separate copyright clause that was itself reasonable).

I pointed out that the work wouldn't result in any inventions and that I couldn't possibly agree to sign future agreements or assign even limited power of attorney to them. They seemed genuinely confused at why I was objecting and wouldn't budge.

While working on company #1, he wanted to bring me in on company #2. He told me the idea, which didn't interest me a whole lot, but there was a key issue with it, culturally speaking. I told him I wasn't sure how he would be able to scale up staff given that people may not want to spend their 40-45 hours/week working on "X". (I"m being purposefully ambiguous...)

His response? "For a paycheck, they will..."

Anyway, that defined his general management philosophy. It's pretty prevalent out there.

This is a guy who can't keep talent for more than a few months at a time... hasn't slowed him down.

I think that's what has impressed me most recently, in my consulting endeavors. The number of moneyed company owners who persist on a destructive chain of behavior in spite of how it hurts their own ambitions.

And yet, in cases like this, if you can succeed just enough, there's nothing stopping you from clamping down because you want to.

I would argue there's a rational economic reason (reducing competition for the labour pool so you can pay them less) but not a morally acceptable nor even free-market-compatible reason. It's major abuse, and it makes me furious that we're using Cushman & Wakefield for our property management.

We need to make employment contracts non-severable so that employers can't get away with this shit. Oh, you want to put in a probably non-enforceable or illegal clause into your contract? Well then the entire thing goes down the toilet when it's found to be invalid. Otherwise employers will keep putting blanket stuff in that they know will probably fail in court to chill their employees.

I agree, the direction seems that way in our new gilded age.

However, I'm not bullish on it being able to survive/thrive. There is just too much change happening. Feudal systems thrive in static environments, not frothy ones. With the rise of Africa in the later half of this century, climate change really starting to swing, the maturation/stagnation of the digital/surveillance economy, and the coming pandora's box of CRISPR-CAS9, the social/economic environment that is giving rise to this Neo-gilded age of corporate feudalism cannot stand for much longer. Life is going to be too 'fun' for the stodgy lords/CEOs.

Totally true.

When I read about stuff like this, increasing surveillance of employees or all the stuff the TSA is planning with face recognition it looks like there is trend that the regular citizen will be under tight control while the ruling class will live behind walls in gated communities where they will be exempt from that control.

As a comfort, at least the sandwich makers and delivery drivers aren't covered.

There's no good reason for a maintenance, food service or custodial worker, or even most programmers (don't kid yourself about how novel the crap you work on is) couldn't work for two competing companies without a conflict of interests.

If two competitors could both outsource the service provided by the employee to the same entity without a conflict of interests then it shouldn't be subject to a non-compete.

NDAs for trade secrets and reasonable policies on use of company assets and time should be able to cover the edge cases.

Yeah, capitalism globally fell to the mixed economy throughout the developed world, to the point that most modern references to “capitalism” refer to the mixed economy, not the original system named “capitalism”, because while people may not have been sold on the prescriptions of more radical alternatives like Communism, they broadly weren't satisfied with capitalism, either.