Amazon lobbies to exempt employees from labor protections (non-compete)
apnews.com
apnews.com
> The protections would partially prohibit non-compete clauses — controversial agreements used by tech companies and others to block employees from going to work for competitors or launching rival startups.
> The bill passed the Washington state Senate Tuesday with the salary threshold set at $100,000 - the level sought by Amazon. Employees above the threshold would be exempted from the labor protection. The original wage threshold in the measure was about $180,000.
Amazon lowered it to pull in most software developers.
> Other provisions require some protections for workers making more than $100,000, including an 18-month limit on any non-compete clauses they sign and a requirement that employees must be compensated while they are barred from working.
At least they have to be compensated but this is still a troubling move from a company that was started by an engineer and devs have been a huge key to their rise.
California is innovative and non-competes are illegal. That shows that non-competes are anti-competition, anti-entrepreneur, anti-small/medium business, anti-worker and most of all anti-innovation.
NDAs are enough, non-competes are excessive. NDAs cover confidential information, existing clients and processes which should be covered if they were invented there, but taking someone's ability/skill that originally got them to your company to help Amazon is a bad move towards developers. Especially bad when Amazon runs a developer cloud platform in AWS where developers/startups choose which cloud to run on many times.
As a smaller company and freelancer/contractor, companies all the time try to give you 2 year non-competes non-compensated for a 6 month to year long project, laughable. Most of the time there you are bringing skills to a company that they didn't have, then they want you to not use them after? That is a no.
Let's hope more states go the way of California on non-competes and that if this ever goes to SCOTUS that it doesn't end up becoming law nationally. Though SCOTUS did recently uphold forced arbitration so that isn't good.
Bezos forgot, the MBAs and lawyers are in charge, ladders that built giants are being pulled up.