10-years is very unreasonable. I can see maybe 1 year or 2 years working for a direct competitor, but 10! Especially contracting. How can you expect to make a living at all?
But even that can easily be unreasonable on its own. For example, think of people working at places like Google, Unilever or some other large entity with its hands it every industry you can imagine because just about everyone is their direct competitor in some industry or another.
If you're specialized to that thing, you're out of well paying work for a year.
If there's such a contract, the company should be paying you either equivalent or more to prevent you from working to your best ability
I once has an employer try to get me to agree to a broad noncompete clause for an unskilled laboring job. When I questioned it, he just deleted it. If he hadn't, I'd have turned down the job because it sounded terrible.
Most people wouldn't, then the whole "job search" process begins again for both parties.
Sounds like a huge waste of time for all involved, which could have been avoided by no having unreasonable crap in the contract and no willingness to remove it. ;)
However, I wasn't commenting on my opinion, just the opinions of my local court system.
In many countries if you want to have an employee bound by a non-compete, you have to compensate the employee for that restriction ('garden pay', I believe?), because by restricting who they can work for, you're by that very nature restricting their ability to seek the most competitive pay. Not to mention, if going to work for a competitor would cost you, say, $1M - then surely you can afford to pay them $50k; that's the deal of the century, in fact! Allowing corporations to foist the cost of a non-compete onto the employee is a pretty American concept.
"But but otherwise it would be really expensive!", I hear the Entreprebros screech. "I couldn't possibly be in business! Muh Burn Rate!"
My response is, "...but I thought you said the employee going to work for a competitor is such a huge financial/competitive threat to your business that you should be allowed to restrict how they can make a living to be able to afford food, housing, transportation, to care for their family members, and so on? Which is it?"...and then I point to all their European competitors who seem to be doing just fine with these supposedly infeasible prohibitions on uncompensated non-competes (and requirements around greater benefits, lower work hours, greater workplace rights, etc.)
Technically non-competes should be illegal simply because the contract bears no benefit or compensation to the employee in exchange for the restrictions imposed that wildly benefit their employer. There's zero benefit to working for an employer who requires one versus ones who do not, but the employer gains (by the very nature of the claim of how necessary the noncompete is!) a great deal.
The situation is absurd. Imagine McDonalds requiring their burger-flippers to not work for any competitors because those competitors might benefit from proprietary McDonalds business practices, training, etc. We'd laugh them right out of the building and point out how stupid it is because all other things aside, where the fuck else is a McDonalds burger-flipper supposed to work, except a place that is likely a competitor to McDonalds?
But Google, MS, Amazon, et al do it to tech workers - even ones who work positions that are compensated an order of magnitude less than engineering talent - datacenter technicians, and it's okay?
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/29/opinion/noncompete-agreem...
What courts deem "reasonable" and have codified under their own case law isn't necessarily the same as what you or I think.
If someone asks me to not work for anyone making widgets that measure the sun's IR emissions at 2222nm with a semiconductor, they can make that 10 years sure.
If they want me to not work for anyone that is competitive with General Electric, 10 seconds is too long because I'll be in breach as soon as I sign it...
Makes the -plantation- er I mean business owners very competitive.