This is really a non-story going into an election year.
I have never heard of a non-compete being enforced here and the right to disconnect is a guideline with absolutely no teeth.
I have never heard of a non-compete being enforced here and the right to disconnect is a guideline with absolutely no teeth.
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 (?)
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.
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.
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.
An outright ban assuages a lot of those fears.
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.
It seemed obviously unenforcible, almost to the point of being comical. But i took it as a giant red flag and declined the interview.
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.)