Ontario bans non-competes and creates right to disconnect from work
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Forcing companies to write down their policy on this seems like a pretty good idea, because it forces HR to actually decide how they want their employees to be treated, and enables middle managers to be held accountable for their actions along this axis.
Make it easy to set up things so that by default whatever message you send after reasonable office hours only gets delivered in the morning.
Further, I don’t require employees to notify the team if they travel to another time zone temporarily (it’s none of my/our business).
Receiver-side notification settings are the workable answer here IMO. (I don’t care when you respond to the Slack channel; I do care that we can use Slack. Slack has the ability to set your own schedule on notifications already.)
I agree that there’s a lot of blame-shifting that happens at work. But lots of people struggle to disconnect from work for non-malicious reasons, either their own or those of someone else.
Yes, but I don't care if they are, it won't make me.
Where it becomes toxic is when the CxOs are on slack 24x7. Then it becomes a company direction, whether explicitly stated or not.
I've also seen the opposite, where the executive team set an exemplary tone about work/life balance in actions and words, so that becomes the company culture.
The worst of it, in some sense, is that they don't even do it from an angle of intentionally attempting to overwork people. It's just that they're an obsessive multitasker who doesn't really get that focus-oriented people need focus time, which is the complete opposite of what slack is.
I can't understand why the person sending the email after dinner is off the hook, but the person forwarding it along is solely to be blamed in your eyes.
Slack helped a lot by making scheduling messages for the next day really simple and not notifying out of hours by default. Outlook could really improve its UX around that functionality - you can schedule messages right now, but it's pretty much hidden.
That said, if we need laws for every small thing that should/could be resolved with common sense, where does it end? Plus, we been ultra specialists for everything, when there are a billion laws.
Still, as you pointed out, if these laws improve the situation, it is a good thing I guess. I just hate that everything needs to be enforced with the threat of fines or violence. Another thing is I don’t trust the government to be impartial.
It’s something that looks like a stick but really a carrot.
It's just more bureaucracy and fodder for the compliance department.
Have an escalation process in place if it’s that important to reach someone after hours.
eta: If you keep yourself on the hook, that's on you.
I can get work email on my device with appropriate software and configuration by my employer.
But why on earth should I ever do that?
If I’m on call like I’ve been over Christmas, I’ll be called by a manager sufficiently high up enough, with a charge code for me answering the phone (4 hours at time and a half), and explain why it was so important to do so.
Personally, I have accepted that the only way I can get a decent-enough separation between "work" and "not-work" is to, as far as possible, separating work devices from personal devices. I have a me-phone, and a work-phone. Unless I am on-call, the work-phone tends to not be near me during not-work-hours, it sometimes gets shut off on weekends (unless, again, on-call). I have a work laptop, and a me-laptop (currently about 80 mm apart), the me-laptop stays closed during work, the work-laptop stays closed outside work.
Come review time you will be dinged for not being a "team player".
Meanwhile the employee that does quickly respond to these messages will get ahead and eventually become your boss.
TBH if something is important enough, I have no problem with responding to it "After work hours", whether it's on the weekend or after work. In the same way, I have no problem taking a long lunch or sleeping in because I know it's a push/pull relationship with work. This is of course much easier to do when you're permanently remote so YMMV
It turns out that it is typical for these behaviors to occur in workplaces, hence laws to prevent it.
This is the first time in my career where I have had push notifications for work email on my phone. I don't love it. Mostly because while many of the emails are not time sensitive once I got in the habit of answering things when they come in instead of batching emails (what i've previously done) then every email seems more important and its easier to answer than to know I've got a non urgent email I need to answer at some point in the next 24-48 hours.
I write all of this to say... Not everyone can turn off work email after 5pm.
Wait until 2 AM, then reply to your boss with a question about the email.
But imo it’s both people fault: it’s also on you to set boundaries, not use email on your phone, etc.
Sometimes they're great and actually invest in the humans at an organization, other times they are the worst humans at an organization.
- a "reasonable" time limit
- a specific geographic region (i.e: only in France, U.E, etc...) -> this is very often omitted, and "the whole world" is not valid.
- The non-competition has to be for a specific activity. This is often not understood and instead you find something like "not work for our competitor" or "not work for a company in this field". This is not specific enough and will be thrown out in court.
- There has to be a financial compensation.
Despite this, almost all the company that I worked for in France had non-applicable non-competes agreement in their contract. None of them offered a financial compensation and none had a specific region.
As far as I know, this is not a France-only thing, and non-competes creeps in almost any employment contract in the world, especially in the tech field. Learn your rights.
[0] https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F1910
Edit: Cool! Thanks all.
Again, ianal
- have a specific reason about why you can't work for the new company - you can't just "non-compete" working for another company in an industry, it has to be that you had access to specific know-how that your old employer wants to keep secret from your new employer.
- have the non-compete time-limited, according to how long the know-how is relevant for.
- offer financial compensation (apparently normally the difference between the salary they would have got if there was no non-compete, and the one they did end up getting at another company)
My understanding is that it sometimes happens for people higher-up in the org-chart, and doesn't really happen so much at the individual contributor level. (I'd be really interested to hear other interpretations, anecdotes or case law though!)
But, as I understand it (but, then, I have NO legal training), if the no-compete is baked into your employment contract, it is null and void after your employment is over. To actually be valid, it needs to be a separate contract. I would double- and triple-check that before relying on it, though.
Legal intimidation. There should be a law against this, like "If a company is notified that part of the contract they wrote is illegal, and they keep knowingly pushing the illegal version, they get fined. And they have to send updated versions with the illegal clauses stricken to everyone that signed the old version."
You can't ask an employee to do something that could put them in prison, but you can absolutely ask an employee to do something that risks the company to be fined.
> nobody gave a shit about fines
Much like doctors (I imagine) fines are inseparable from insurance, and or capital held/made from some activity. Fines covered by the money you made doing whatever you did are symbolic - they need to ramp up each time or they become meaningless.
> You can't ask an employee to do something that could put them in prison
Yes you can. If you think of a company as a collective, prison is an easy way to encourage scapegoating.
I think a better way is license suspension. Break some trading law? You are no longer allowed to trade, all trading business now non-profitable. Required to supply some information proving you aren't up to no good? 30 days to provide it or your business license is suspended, all new business is illegal until resolved.
target business activity and it's harder to do BAU in the face of penalties.
Also, one complexity is that you want to phrase it in a way that respects the power differential. It is basically expected in the adversarial system that you raise all the arguments you think might work, and one potential way this plan could rot is "Public defenders get disbarred/imprisoned for making good-faith arguments that ended up not convincing a judge."
This is very common in finance, the issue often is that in finance you'll often have a low salary that is made up for by a large bonus and capital gains from investing the hedge fund you work for.
So when it comes time for your garden leave the company can just keep paying your salary and not your prorated "total comp" which is often many multiples of your salary for the 6-12 month period you sit out.
- claim the clause null and work wherever I wanted
- follow the clause obligations and ask for half of my salary for the 3 years of non-compete
Moreover, when quitting, if they did not explicitly waive the clause, I could also ask for those 3 years of compensation... but they did not forget that when I left ;(
> The legislation offers no guidance as to what must be included in the policy, and simply provides that the policy must include "such information as may be prescribed." This was apparently intentional as noted in the legislative summary in an effort to offer employers flexibility to develop a policy appropriate to its operational needs.
So unless I’m missing something, a company can write down “Employees must be available as needed” or something equally vague and they comply with the policy.
In practice I would expect most employers to write a lot of vague wording about how employees aren’t required to be active online in their off hours, but they’ll leave the door open for emergency communications as needed. No sane company is going to write down a legally binding policy that nobody is going to contact anybody else at certain times. Imagine how easy it would be for a manager to break such a restriction by accidentally tagging an employee name in Slack at the wrong time of day, for example.
The “right to disconnect” seems largely symbolic.
On the other hand, banning non-competes is a big deal. They are effectively banned in my location (and several other states in the United States) and it’s great to not worry about it at all.
Let people know upfront what they are getting into, and then let them make their own choice about whether it's worthwhile or not.
There might be some argument about whether this kind of 'consenting adults' approach to labour regulation is the right or wrong approach for less well off people. (Many people seem to think that the poor are like kids and need to be protected from themselves by someone who knows better what's good for them..)
But for people in the ever-booming field of software, that's a hard argument to make.
That's not the reason. If you're poor, you are likely desperately looking for a job. This means that if you are offered one with shit working conditions, but that pays better than your current situation (which might be zero!), you HAVE TO take it. Most people have nearly zero bargaining power in their employment, which is why we need regulation especially for them.
And yes, while in a highly-valued field like IT, we usually have enough bargaining power, regulation still helps us. If the baseline was "just don't beat your workers, everything else is legal", we'd have a lot more to negotiate first, before we even got to the things we negotiate these days like benefits, loose schedules, work from home, etc.
And it's not like we can't fall on hard times either. Not everyone that is paid well is rich. They might be the main source of income for a large family or a have sick or old relatives to take care of. Or they might be at the start of their career without any savings. Bargaining power comes from the ability to quit, which comes from the ability to find a new job before your savings run out. No matter your industry, finding a job still takes time, so if you don't have enough savings to cover that time, you're in no better of a position than the poor person from the first paragraph.
Nah. Compare eg restaurants. Food safety is strictly regulated in many countries, but taste ain't. Still, you can walk into most restaurants and get something reasonably palatable. No need to laboriously negotiate the taste.
Similarly, in place and times when there was no minimum wage, people didn't typically negotiate their compensation from a baseline of zero. The baseline is what's prevalent in the market.
(My adopted home of Singapore doesn't have a minimum wage today. Germany and Hong Kong only got theirs relatively recently. The pre-20th-century US didn't have one either, yet was the target of many migrants.)
> And it's not like we can't fall on hard times either. Not everyone that is paid well is rich. They might be the main source of income for a large family or a have sick or old relatives to take care of.
That might be an argument for a social safety net financed by tax payers. But not an argument in favour of adding extra burdens on those who would offer poor people a job. See https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...
It wouldn’t surprise me if vague clauses don’t get upheld, or if requiring an employee to be connected also comes with the responsibility of compensation and expenses. When I worked for a company that required me to do on-call on holidays or weekends, I was given an extra vacation day in compensation even if I hadn’t actually done anything but triage.
Work life in Canada seems generally much more balanced from an anecdotal perspective.
This also occurs in the US and is more due to tech labor market tightness.
It wasn’t done to retain hard to recruit tech employees, it was done because that is the expectation in many office environments in Canada.
Employees can't magically 'expect' their total comp up or down. But expectations can drive how that comp is commonly split between eg salary and benefits like longer lunch hours.
'Always' is an exaggeration, but yes, that's the gist of it.
According to the link, this is not the case. It seems very clear that the only requirement is that the policy is written down.
> When I worked for a company that required me to do on-call on holidays or weekends, I was given an extra vacation day in compensation even if I hadn’t actually done anything but triage.
That's been standard practice every place I've worked in the United States, too. Not by law, just because it's a decent thing to do.
You had the choice of idling off those extra hours with extra vacation or to get them paid out.
Oncall hours tracking was capped at 15% of normal hours, to give you an incentive to distribute oncall equally around the team. (I never heard of anyone seriously hitting that cap.)
Overall, seemed like a well-thought-out and fair system to me.
You are not entitled to:
daily or weekly limits on hours of work
daily rest periods
time off between shifts
weekly/bi-weekly rest periods
eating periods
overtime pay
Canada (Ontario specifically in this case) gets a lot wrong as well. Any movement in the right direction is a good thing.
Edit: I guess I need to stop commenting at this hour, HN is ridiculous with their down votes when the Europeans are on. God forbid someone tries to ask a question here.
IT is not the only field with these exemption but it is perhaps one of the least motivated. Afaik, it was added to the list when most IT workers were working in critical infrastructure like telecom. It's not really justified anymore, if it ever was (imo it isn't justified for anyone, but I am probably rare in thinking that in an entrepreneur-focused space).
It's not quite as bad as reddit, yet, where you get downvoted to hell for suggesting that the rule of law is preferable to mob violence against people accused of being 'parasites' or accused of certain crimes or thoughtcrime.
I know this is "very European of me", but those are all very basic worker rights that most reasonable countries have had for decades.
I have never heard of a non-compete being enforced here and the right to disconnect is a guideline with absolutely no teeth.
That being said, my contract with AWS stipulates that I can't work for their competitors, it's insanely wide so I don't see how it could realistically be enforced, but I still signed it which means that technically I can't work for Azure/GCP. I would much rather see the practice outlawed entirely so as to not have to worry about it.
I think that lower-on-the-totem-pole folks are unlikely to suffer, but HR departments love to have as much ammo as possible.
As I work for an American parent company and my non-compete covers basically any other security or enterprise company. No IBM or EY or SAP for me.
Ironically the subsidiary I work for is included on the list and the list includes no actual direct competitors.
So walking away to our competitor and building them the exact same thing is interestingly legally fine.
No, they aren’t even legal in California so it’s just some employers and in some states. The financial ones in NY are actually pretty reasonable because employers will pay you during the time after you leave when you aren’t allowed to go to a competitor. Not sure if that’s legally require there or just the market expectation.
In any case, I think above some level of compensation basically all crazy clauses that people agree to voluntarily should be fine as far as the law is concerned: there's no need to protect well-off people from themselves.
There might or might not be an argument that poor people need to be protected from themselves like little children, and thus that there should be some contracts they shouldn't be allowed to enter. (Just like we only allow some very carefully considered contracts for children to enter into. Eg buying candy is fine; but going into debt is not enforceable against them.)
It seemed obviously unenforcible, almost to the point of being comical. But i took it as a giant red flag and declined the interview.
With respect to the right to disconnect, simply having a written policy will help in many instances. I have worked for organizations where upper management generally frowned upon employees being contacted outside of work hours for anything more than checking a person's availability to work or telling a person not to report to work. Yet lower levels of management never seem to receive that message (possibly because they are expected to be on call).
A non-compete is (ostensibly) intended to protect employers' trade-secret-esque internal knowledge and practices, which low income jobs don't really get much exposure to.
Granted, many non-competes are legal boilerplate that businesses probably shouldn't need, but I can't imagine a business actually doing a cost/benefit analysis on paying legal to go after someone who makes peanuts.
Having worked at JJ’s, I don’t think they were taught anything remotely with a non-compete. I think they just didn’t want somebody becoming a manager and then using that to get a better job across the street. Training employees is expensive.
But that was their rationale, anyway.
>FWIW that was only intended for store managers
Do you mean intended for store manager and applied to store managers only, or intended for store managers and applied to everyone (because template/boilerplate [0])? This press release [1] states it covered positions more junior than store manager.
As an aside: interested if anyone knows what is meant by copyright in the press release above:
>Madigan’s suit alleges the companies required all employees to sign a non-compete agreement, which the company claims is covered by copyright, as a condition of employment.
[0] I experienced this. Would recommend to anyone to at least question any condition you don't like, even if you aren't able to negotiate. I was taking a low-level position at a large organisation so I had no real leverage and had a condition crossed off because it was meant for full-time and fixed-term employees but somehow made it into my casual contract, presumably because it was part of some boilerplate.
[1] https://www.illinoisattorneygeneral.gov/pressroom/2016_06/20...
The latter. My guess is that (for non-managers) it was boilerplate and nobody either noticed or cared enough to remove it. It's not surprising—lots of weird, sometimes contradictory stuff ends up in contracts.
I could _maybe_ see them trying to enforce it on a store or district manager if the manager decided to split immediately after being flown out to Illinois, or something. But I recall multiple managers leaving to go work at other fast food places—some even on bad terms—and nobody was ever sued. One manager even stole large sums of money and they basically said, "Oh well."
JJ's likes to pretend it's a fancy QSR, but it's all bark. You have to learn the menu and pass a test before you can get hired, but in reality you can bomb the test and still get hired. They have a strict dress code, but it's only enforced when corporate comes to do its yearly reviews. I don't see them caring enough to ever go through the effort of suing an employee for a non-compete.
But it's been 10 years since I worked there, so perhaps things have changed.
It seems a bit silly to me, as it seems to cost the employee more than the benefit the employer receives from that clause.
(Though the real benefit to the employer might be in decreasing the employees outside options, thus allowing better control.
I wonder how one might test that theory.)
Are you surprised employers can exploit unskilled laborers? It's not silly. It's asymmetrical power resulting in exploitation of people who don't have many options in jobs they can find.
For the unskilled labourer, it doesn't matter much whether they work for Burger King or McDonald's.
In contrast, many software people do care whether they work for Facebook or Google. So the preferred employer has some (minor) monopsony power.
Of course, the overall comp for the software guy is better.
I am not sure what you mean by 'exploitation'.
It also doesn't matter for those companies which cashier out of the 100s of applicants they hire. Your only power as an employee is the power to quit and if you can't guarantee that you'll get a new job quickly enough, you're powerless.
Employers with better reputation have an easier job both hiring and retaining.
Treating people unnecessarily badly leads to a worse reputation.
Before the current tight labor market, if someone who was living paycheck to paycheck found themself unemployed, they took whatever job they could get. Maybe they apply for 10 jobs and only hear back from 1 for an interview. They have hungry children to feed and don’t have any money for groceries. The employer understands that most applicants are desperate for any job so can tack on any terms they want - such as a non-compete.
An outright ban assuages a lot of those fears.
The commencement of the lawsuit:
https://www.so-co-it.com/post/222748/orbixa-technologies-sui...
The settlement:
https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/jitneytrade-inc-announ...
For the most part that settlement happened because the company suing me went bankrupt and its successor didn't feel like continuing to pay legal fees for a case they knew they would lose. Ordinarily I'd be able to recoup legal fees, but I was advised that recouping fees from a bankrupt entity is all but impossible.
> The commencement of the lawsuit:
> https://www.so-co-it.com/post/222748/orbixa-technologies-sui...
Based on that link, the issue at hand doesn't seem to be about a non-compete (?)
Being sincerely passionate about something can sometimes backfire on you.
I've dealt with this recently, although it was in Québec where civil law applies so I don't know if it's the same. Here the case-law limits non-compete agreements to about ~1 year (most likely 6 months), to a specific relevant geographical area (think a county) and to a specific industry and if any of those clauses are not respected than the whole non-compete agreement is invalid. In my case they made the agreement to "companies offering engineering services", which was clearly abusive and thus I could get my new job after lawyers talked.
I understand why they want to make it illegal, it has the potential to screw over many people and be very unfair. But there's a perverse effect of not having those is that establishing trust to climb the ladder will much more difficult since the trust barrier is set higher since nothing will stop someone from working to a direct competitor. This has been a real huge concern in places I used to work and I know from confidences that was made to me that people were constructively fired for not being trusted enough. IMO they should just have made it more restricted.
IMO
Perhaps there’s some value in making it explicit, yet again. But I think this is one of those frustrating “another law for something we already have a law for.”
Just like “no pets” or anything else that’s very explicitly banned in the landlord tenant act.
[0]: https://devrylaw.ca/renting-in-ontario-what-every-pet-owner-... [1}: https://animaljustice.ca/blog/renting-with-pets-a-guide-to-o... [2]: https://www.toronto.ca/community-people/housing-shelter/rent...
This depends completely on the jurisdiction and the circumstances. Non-competes in California and Texas are largely unenforceable (but not completely), whereas non-competes in New York and Massachusetts are enforceable.
Edit: Here’s a state-by-state roundup: https://faircompetitionlaw.com/changing-landscape-of-trade-s...
So I’m happy to go work for a competitor and reimplement exactly what I’ve just done at my current job. If they really want me to not work for a competitor I’d be willing to discuss it but it would cost upwards of what I’m making as an employee.
lol - cofounder is fine, as well as board member, head of sales... really whatever you want your title to be
One of my biggest frustrations when working at Apple was how awful and draconian their non-compete was. California law protects Californians a bit in this regard, but I was working out of New York, and as a result those protections didn’t apply to me.
At the most adversarial, a contract is what you use as the basis for litigation, if it comes to a legal fight.
But a well written contract is meant to avoid costly litigation, by making clear what both parties expect from each other.
In practice, contracts are often boiler plate and lots of provisions do not apply, but would still be legally enforceable. While other expectations apply, but are not in the contract or are not enforceable.
To give a silly example: many of my employment contracts specified some pro-forma working hours like 8am to 5pm. That was never enforced.
But: if I had annoyed my employer in a way that the legally binding parts of the contract did not specify (eg by breaking an onerous clause that wasn't actually legally binding), they could have used those other clauses to annoy me. Or just fired me for officially unrelated reasons, or no official reason at all.
yes, it is discretionary, know your leverage and be able to afford it.
Funny enough, I helped plenty of people from past employers to find new jobs; but never with my current employer, but typically with some other past employer.
But since this is a US website about programming/business, you're probably not going to talk to a lot of Ontarians about programming or engineering, so this is probably useless information for you. But hey, there you go. Trivia night.
Non-competes were never enforceable.
This is just BS toothless legislation from an unpopular corporatist government going into an election year pretending to be pro-worker.
The vaccinated have now matched the case count and hospitalization number of the unvaccinated. So come January, probably even more people will be working from home, because Ontario seems to be headed for another lockdown.
Ontario is the "California" engine province of Canada, similar in geographic size and sophistication. It subsidizes the rest of Canada (the "have-nots"), but it can afford to do so.
To give you an idea of how sophisticated Ontario is, most Hollywood comedians and a large percentage of writers are originally from the Toronto, ON area because of their writing and self-production abilities.
Ontario universities have a direct brain-drain pipeline to SV, but this will help them return later in their careers.
Haha, that's just because Ontario has a large population with respect to Canada as a whole. Sophistication is not the right word to use as someone from Ontario.
Quick Wikipedia lookup of Canadian provinces by GDP per capita shows Ontario’s at 61k CAD, which precisely matches Canada’s overall
Whereas Alberta’s is 31% higher.
> It subsidizes the rest of Canada (the "have-nots"), but it can afford to do so.
This is only a very recent phenomena that they are not getting equalization payments [1]. Even then, it's mostly because of the bottom provinces falling even further than Ontario rising. Don't even be tempted to blame this on the rural areas as Toronto alone accounts for about half the population.
> To give you an idea of how sophisticated Ontario is, most Hollywood comedians and a large percentage of writers are originally from the Toronto, ON area because of their writing and self-production abilities.
Such a sophisticated engine cannot keep them?
> Ontario universities have a direct brain-drain pipeline to SV, but this will help them return later in their careers.
From my personal experience, other than interns and students, I don't know a single Canadian who opted to build a career in the US and later to return.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equalization_payments_in_Canad...
How? I was wondering if you were talking about equalization payments, but it looks like Ontario is sending none and it used to receive payments from other provinces during most of the 2010's.
Also, many provinces may claim to be the California of Canada based on different aspects (laws, taxation, proximity to west coast, health system, climate, car-centricity - where Ontario would win, etc.), but this has the same value as cities claiming they are the new SV: not so much.
BC has the real title of Canadas California! We have unaffordable housing, restrictive zoning powered by aging hippy boomers in multimillion dollar homes, temperate weather, and a massive film industry.
To top it off we resent our conservative neighbors to the East and have a chip on our shoulders about our overlords in the east.
BC is definitely the California of Canada.
The thing that unites all Canadians though is our strong belief that our neighbors to the south are dangerous and run by a corrupt and incompetent political system, regardless of their suitability as a winter vacation spot. Which… I guess is a feeling that the Americans have too.
Haha. Correction made