4. Contracts with executive and management personnel and employees who constitute professional staff to executive and management personnel.
There is an actual clause covering secretaries! So you can be sure your secretary will not go working for a competitor. You do not have to think hard to guess who had this law written for themselves.
Even when one of these exceptions applies, Colorado courts insist that the non-compete provisions be reasonable in duration and scope.
For example, a state that has a law which says non-competes much be “reasonable”, may be enforced by the courts as “1 year in duration and within 50 miles”.
Let's say you work for a consultancy in a large metropolitan area covering 5MM+ people and this area has 100+ consultancies. There are many groups of these consultancies and they all service different verticals. There are no other major areas with concentrations of business within hundreds of miles (see middle America).
A person may have been working exclusively within the healthcare vertical at one consultancy and would move to another to work in a completely different vertical (e.g., retail). Would 'reasonable' cover this nuance? Probably not, particularly not in the favor of the worker.
In practice, you can call up a lawyer in any state that requires non-competes to be "reasonable" and they can tell you more specifically what the court will enforce.
- The almost conspiracy-esque malice of bending ‘to the rich’ that the grandparent poster was talking about is much more easily explained by ‘these people also have unusually privileged information’.
- I think the thinking (perhaps unfairly) went like this: Whilst there is such a thing as domain skill, a noncompete should affect a secretary or assistant minimally in practice, as they generally have a broad, non-domain-specific skillset, unlike the executive they report to.
These aren't what people think of as 'secretaries'. These are highly skilled executive assistants with WAY more domain-specific skills than you're giving them credit for. I have friends that do this for C level executives. Including at $100bn+ companies. A non-compete within a given industry would severely hamstring their future career.
I knew this (correct) case would be made as I was writing my comment, but thought I could avoid including a sub-clause to deal with this topic.
So yes — I know folks like this too and fully acknowledge the skillset involved. Some of those folks have a deep skillset and yet don’t have any particular knowledge such that a noncompete would make sense to keep them from spreading it.
Per my comment I don’t like noncompetes — but I do think that this is the thinking that was used to define policy around this.
I also do think that there is an exclusion zone, whereby folks are either:
- Non-specific and not affected by this materially.
- Highly skilled and /would/ take material privileged information with them.
- High skilled and /would not/.
I suspect the last category is just elided in the thinking that led to this coming to be.
I don't think the answer here is necessarily all that clever -- charged conversation notwithstanding, I just wanted to get at the fact that it's likely /not a conspiracy/.
I would love to deflate this mess of a subthread. :)
Huh? The VP of Engineering has a hefty stock plan, a guaranteed bonus, and a three-year contract. Do you really think that her secretary has anything comparable? Heck, her secretary doesn't even have a three-year contract.
But I don’t know if that is why the carve-out is there or not. I doubt it, but some exec contracts absolutely allow for a guaranteed support staff of the exec’s choosing.
The VP's contract reasonably protects the VP from the consequences of a non-compete. The VP's staff has no such protection.
No it's not. If the VP's contract says "The company will hire an assistant for you" then the assistant negotiates with HR for their salary like a regular employee. If the VP's contract says "You get $100K/yr to hire an assistant" then the assistant can't get a raise until the VP's contract changes.
> The VP's contract reasonably protects the VP from the consequences of a non-compete.
It might, or it might not. Contracts do whatever they say they do. If the contract says "You and your staff can't work for any of our competitors unless it's a leap year and you say Pretty Please" then that's what it says.
More generally, above a certain level, executives are more like a small agency than a single person. If you hire Tim Cook to be the next CEO of your startup, he's going to bring his current assistant(s) with him, he's not just going to inherit whoever the old CEO's assistant was.
Most laws revolving around protecting corporate secrets are enablers of inequality that the public pays for. It’s one of these services the government provides to business that it really shouldn’t.
The only reason I commented was to dispel and push back on the conspiracy-esque style that the parent commenter used to characterise /how/ the law got written this way.
You’re absolutely right. I’d happy sign any non-compete contract as long as _I’m paid my salary throughout the non-compete cool-down period”
The last contract I signed (1 sheet of A4) bound me not to take work with a "competitor" for 6 months after quitting. Since the employer's clients were all local, I took that as meaning I was not to take a job with a web-shop in the same town. And I thought 6 months seemed reasonable - after all, we weren't developing patentable inventions, we were just making websites.
[Edit] I think the purpose of the clause was mainly to stop me taking customer lists to the competitor. I'd have thought that fell squarely into the "unfaithful servant" bag - it's a scummy way for an employee to carry on.
So do accountants and lawyers. But do try and enslave them with such a law and watch as the world erupts.
Why would rich and powerful executives lobby to make sure there is an 'exception' that keeps them bound by these contracts?
One answer: It helps them. If you're in demand, you can extract more money by promising to keep the secrets. This gives "executives" and "secretaries to executives" a special way to extract a little more.
I don't see how that's just secretaries. As a programmer I am:
a. A Professional
b. Staff
c. I work for Executives and Management Personnel.
So this basically means programmers are also in this bucket?
Though a real quick search did turn up a case where what the lawmakers intended by "management" was in question, so there is a distinct possibility they wrote their terms badly. It's weird reading a law that introduces terms like that without defining them.
I feel like the lawyers writing the law felt bad about saying: The people directly responsible for scheduling lunches and making sure executives have time to poop between calls.
I think the reality of it is that secretaries are a form of excessiveness and they are afraid of losing that.
https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/226/Non_Compete_Contr...
First I had no idea how prolific non-competes are.
> Non-competes are a central labor market institution, with nearly one fifth of all American workers currently bound by such a contract.
After the policy recommendations, here is the conclusion from that paper.
> Though non-compete contracts can have important social benefits, principally related to the protection of trade secrets, a growing body of evidence suggests that they are frequently used in ways that are inimical to the interests of workers and the broader economy. Enhancing the transparency of non-competes, better aligning them with legitimate social purposes like protection of trade secrets, and instituting minimal worker protections can all help to ensure that non-compete contracts contribute to economic growth without unduly burdening workers.
Any non-compete clause must come with a requirement to pay that employee to not compete. That will quickly get rid of non-competes that aren't actually their for the purpose of protecting trade secrets.
Some states are more friendly to labor exploitation than others.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust...
The defendants were high-technology companies Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay, each of which was headquartered in Silicon Valley, in the southern San Francisco Bay Area of California.
The civil suit was filed by five plaintiffs. It accused the tech companies of collusion between 2005 and 2009 to refrain from recruiting each other's employees.
They stole billions of dollars from their staff. Eric Schmidt, one of the main conspirators, is still in a leadership role at Google.
Companies will sit on new medications until right before/after the similar, but older, medications they own/license are off patent, that way they always have another patented medication waiting in the wings for when they're done squeezing every cent they can out of their old ones.
Plus, there is nothing stopping another company from making a similar drug and beating you to market - there were over 6 -statin drugs in the market at one point.
Every politician sponsored by a large corporation
First one is the weather.
(I'm kidding. But I'm not.)
Ask US citizens why we still don't have paid maternity or paternity leave...
This applies to pretty much any valuable information that fits in one person's head.
That doesn't make sense. If that were true, there would be one trading firm in California that only existed to hire traders from other firms and copy results.
There are also very few plantations, victorian workhouses and open pit coal mines. Some kind of businesses aren't worth having.
On a more positive note: I wish wealthy countries would pass laws to ban ship breaking in countries with weaker environmental laws. It seems like a terrible loop hole today that would not be very expensive to patch. When you look at how chemical plants operate in wealthy (mostly environmentally clean) places, pollution controls are front and center for the whole staff. They well know the fines easily exceed profits, and they don't want to wreck their own communities with pollution.
If a trading firm is going to use human traders they would not do it in Cali, because they will have to force their traders to work at uncomfortable hours. If a trading firm is going to use solely computers, they would not do it in California because the time a network signal takes to reach California from New York actually matters in computer based trading.
Nah dude, grandparent is talking about smart Robinhood traders
The real issue is when firms won't pay workers for this privilege. This should be outlawed. It is harmful to workers and competition ("free movement of labour").