Unless you have a clause in your employment contract forbidding employees from having another job you have no right to care if they do as long as they are meeting productivity requirements.
Non-competes are illegal or unenforceable in the following US states: California, North Dakota, the District of Columbia, Oklahoma, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Washington.
Also, if a company asks you to sign one, you can say no. I always do.
For example, in California, you can't ban someone from working for a competitor after leaving.
You absolutely can ban them from working for a competitor at the same time.
How?
California offers protection for "lawful conduct occurring during nonworking hours away from the employer's premises."
Note that it specifies "nonworking hours". There is also an exemption for working for a competitor.
https://www.mossbollinger.com/blog/2020/december/my-employer...
My employer can also ban me from stealing money or tools. If they discover it, they can legally fire me.
You stated that non-competes are illegal. This is incorrect in the context of moonlighting with competitors or concurrent employment (with anyone during working hours). Those types of non-competes are completely legal.
I expect we will see a rise in the number of contracts that explicitly state no other employment during business hours.
Non-compete in this context means post-facto (forward-looking) non-competes.
That is the letter of the law, but that has not been the interpretation (re: a 2020 appellate ruling mentions this)
https://calawyers.org/business-law/california-appellate-cour...
I also happen to know that ND non-competes are enforceable in a limited fashion.
1 - you are a manager.
2 - you are selling a company.
If you are a coder or regular employee, then no, the non-competes are not worth the paper they are printed on.
> The Jimmy John’s agreement prohibited employees during their employment and for two years afterward from working at any other business that sells “submarine, hero-type, deli-style, pita, and/or wrapped or rolled sandwiches” within 2 miles of any Jimmy John’s shop in the United States, according to Madigan’s lawsuit. An agreement in effect from 2007 to 2012 extended that to 3 miles.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-jimmyjohns-settlement/jim...
https://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/22/jimmy-johns-drops-non-compet...
They were being sued in IL & NY by the states' attorneys general over the issue.
> Most benefits plans will detail the eligibility requirements to participate in the plan, including employee classification (full-time, part-time, regular, temporary, etc.) and/or numbers of hours worked per week or month. Once these classifications change for a covered employee, his or her eligibility will need to be reassessed.
> Short-term, temporary changes usually will not change an employee classification. For example, if a full-time employee goes on vacation for three weeks, most employers would not change the employee's full-time status. However, if an employee reduces his or her hours during the school year to accommodate his or her class schedule, employers may want to reclassify the employee to part time due to the length of the arrangement. It boils down to how the employer defines the classifications and how they are used in the eligibility requirements of each plan.
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Without getting to an attempt to measure productivity...
The nightmare scenario for HR in this situation is to have someone who is a full time worker and getting full time benefits is found to be splitting their time between two or more companies in a way practically means that they couldn't be working the necessary number of hours to be eligible for benefits at the company.
Having an insurance company or similar decides that your employee isn't eligible for the benefits that you claim they are and ask for an audit of employee time now and going forward, this gets into the "this is gonna suck" category.
There are also issues of IP assignment where one (or both) companies make claims to the inventions that were produced "during work hours" at the other company.
That employee also likely assigned all IP they created during work hours to two companies.
That's not to say that some employers wouldn't be OK with it, just that it tends to be thrown in by the lawyers because why not.
The relevance here is many managers have experience with employees who seemed fine in interviews and barely met performance bars (or just flat out didn’t) despite working just one job.
It’s well within their legal rights (and a useful heuristic!) to not hire someone because they’re not comfortable rolling the dice on a candidate being able to meet performance criteria because they’re working multiple jobs. Because working multiple jobs is a lot harder than working one job on pretty much any metric one can think of, and is not a protected class or status.
They’ll also reap any blowback or rewards from doing so, including difficulty finding candidates, or not.
A manager considering it for something like a software dev position would just be hurting themselves, though likely only a little as I doubt ‘candidate wears plaid’ comes up often.
If it was someone hiring for a fashion designer position, or a public facing spokesperson position, plaid could be a huge plus or a huge minus (I’m guessing huge minus as of right now for most), and what the candidate wears and how the they present themselves relative to current fashions and norms is a huge and important element that the hiring manager would be incompetent to not consider.
That said, there are plenty of managers who are pretty incompetent.
You don't. But you never know that for sure. The whole interview process is just gathering data to make an estimate about whether or not the person will successfully perform in the role. Them having another job would be almost the strongest indicator I could imagine that they will not be successful.
As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, many people successfully work multiple jobs.
Or, you can try to guesstimate that by checking with previous employers. Which was the OP's point I guess, or alternatively the OP's point was "I give my employees a 40 hours/week contract, so they can't really have another job (and still perform adequately, or simply they can't depending on the law of the country)"
An employee lying on their W-4 about having multiple jobs can create a lot of legal and bureaucratic overhead.