Comment by revel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by revel | Hacker News Reader

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It's time we took a serious look at getting rid of the unholy trinity of employment contract law:

- Non-competes - Forced arbitration - Non-disparagement / NDAs

If an offer includes a non-compete, it should also include appropriate restitution to the employee for the opportunity cost involved. This means paid garden leave and also extra compensation to help employees find their next job since their skills are likely to have degraded during the fallow period.

Forced arbitration is used to rob employees of their constitutional rights and I can't believe that the practice is legal.

Lastly, non-disparagement clauses and NDAs are overly broad. I'm not opposed to NDAs with limited scope but NDAs have become blanket weapons used to cover up evidence of illegal or immoral acts by employers. This is particularly problematic when combined with forced arbitration since it means that employees subject to wage theft (for instance) are unable to join a class action suit and verdicts rendered by the arbitration court can be kept secret.

All three of these practices are basically a repudiation of both democracy and our legal system with extremely negative effects for society and representative government. I completely agree with you.

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.

Repeating a comment from another thread - this article shows what has been tried in some NDAs: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/aug/26/former-weinstei...

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.

That's a very different scenario. That was a settlement offer -- Weinstein effectively offered her a bribe to drop her complaint and cover for him. She could choose to refuse the settlement and press her case through the courts, which of course would be the same option as if there was no settlement offer. Weinstein would never agree to pay her a settlement that didn't limit his liability -- the value of that to him is $0.

Any clause that is valid after the termination of the contract (with the exceptions already in law, like IP) should have a compensatory counterpart

It would be great to have this encoded in statute. In the US, the doctrine of consideration in contract law used to server to rein this in, but in the last century has been weakened to the point where it has become a non-factor in most contractual disputes.

How would that matter, since money is fungible -- wages spend as well as Nnn-compete compensation.

In Germany it's like this.

Assuming you can read German. My German is horrid, but the German company I work for assured me contracts can only be in German.

For international companies it's common to provide a version in both German and English, with the caveat that only the German version is binding.

That is how it was for me, I got a two-column contract with each paragraph in both languages.

you forgot ip contracts

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

At least it came up early in the process. Usually this is the sort of thing that gets sprung on someone after they've decided to accept an offer.

Often in the first-day paperwork, or in the employee handbook which you don't see until day one, if at all.

In days past, there would sometimes be clauses asserting ownership over all IP for rest of your life, till courts finally declared those too much, since they deprived people of their livelihoods.

Cute factoid: Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel) was an advertising copywriter. He went into children's books because that was all that was permitted under his employment contract.

Wow, that is terrible.

I remember the first time I ended an interview early. I was 19. I applied to a food factory job. The general manager interviewed me, and then asked me a question "Are you married, son? We like to support families."

I said "That's an illegal question and you should know better. Good bye."

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