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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad my state took action on this topic.

IMO noncompete clauses have no place in a free flowing market.

But think of the "employer community". How can they punish employees for leaving now?

If companies are implementing unfair policies like non-competes then the invisible hand of the free market will cause employees to leave those companies or never join them! I mean it's really not very likely that the 2-3 CEOs we currently have for each industry now could possibly find time to meet in a room together in order to pad their pockets with billions more and help squash further competition.

Of course the will not, as it will be illegal. Nobody is stupid enough to write an email admitting to doing it.

I actually had my dad hide out at my place because, while he was visiting, a person attempted to serve him for a non-compete clause. It was in a contract that was written over 20 years ago and never re-authorized. The contract even stated it would only be viable for 1 year.

Company even tried using the state he was living in versus the state the company was registered with because the ladder had more strict non-compete causes and the former recently pass laws against non-compete.

Sorry but a person's lively hood should not be revoked because they left their former employer that treated them like shit.

Of course it equivalent to a SLAP suit and nothing of value came of it. It cost both parties loss of income. Game theory was a loose loose outcome resolution. The case did help other leave the company with impunity and no court case because of the loss.

Lucky his next employer fitted the bill if he stayed on for four years.

You joke, but that's exactly who this government are thinking of. We had the best NLRB for workers in decades and a spell of full employment, and they're now trying to roll that back as best they can while also deporting part of the labor force.

More easily now that the nrlb rescinded those bans.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this action by the NLRB expands the applicability of non-competes. The policy that they rescinded held that (some) non-competes violate employee rights.

That's my understanding too, this isn't some wholesale / anything goes "non-compete bonanza". It does however tell you what direction the administration would like this to go.

Ah, I overlooked the "my state" in your original post.

Which state?

I thought only California bans non competes. Washington almost did, but then their leaders took bribes from the tech companies to exclude higher earners.

Minnesota did as of 2023. Might be others

https://www.mmmlaw.com/news-resources/minnesota-becomes-yet-...

North Dakota and Oklahoma as well, according to this map:

https://eig.org/state-noncompete-map/

In my case Minnesota.

Illinois has restrictions as well for employees <= ~$75k, for cases where it is clear that there is no clear business interest, employers must cover the cost where their NCA is overturned, etc.

https://www.ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/ilcs3.asp?ActID=3737&C...

For anyone curious the earning thresholds in Washington for non-competes to be OK were $120560 for employees and $301400 for independent contractors last year.

When non-competes are allowed they are limited to 18 months, and if you get laid off they are void unless the employer continues to pay your base salary during the duration of the non-compete.

Nor do giant companies that are immune to competition. But somehow both parties look the other way on antitrust, which is probably even more critical to having a free flowing market.

So the federal government hasn't insisted that non competes be enforced, it just no longer holds that they violate national law, and returned the power to regulate them to the states?

This seems like a good and sensible thing. Most other employment law issues are regulated at the state level. If banning noncompetes was popular enough to get passed by the federal government, surely there are at least 20 or so states that would want to ban them locally.

Maybe we should leave slavery up to the states too. Surely there are at least 20 states that would want to ban it locally.

I'm against non-competes, but likening them to slavery seems distasteful. I'm not sure they infringe on people's freedoms or rather a specific people's freedoms the way slavery did/does. No one is going to secede over non-competes.

It illustrates the way the "leave it up to the states" argument grates on some ears. It's a slippery slope argument, which is not automatically faulty. It is a call to know how you expect things to not slide down.

If the suggestion is "anything shy of complete chattel slavery", people get worried.

Why have states at all then? Why not just one giant national government?

Why have a federal government at all if states are perfectly well suited to all forms of human rights oversight, lawmaking, etc?

Collective defense?

The US has been that since 1861.

In living memory, at least 3 SCOTUS judges have stated that slavery is legal and should not have been ended.

Two of those justices currently sit on the Supreme Court.

Please cite.

I’m not the person you are replying to, but California had a ballot initiative that would finally eliminated slavery in California in 2024.

It failed.

If you think the US completely banned slavery, or that slavery is unpopular, you’re misinformed.

Well that was about forced labor in prisons which is a bit different.

Restricting the slave owner to the state (+ leasing to businesses) does not make it not slavery. I can't believe I have to say this.

To quote a well known (fictional) sociopath - ‘what’s to prove? It’s free labor!’

What does that have to do with non-competes?

Really? If you are an employee of Microsoft, how is it possible not to run afoul of a non-compete in tech for example?

I think it best non competes simply don't exist.

Want to keep your employees, compete in the market.

> Most other employment law issues are regulated at the state level.

this is just flat-out not true. look at the NLRB [0] and OSHA [1] for the two most obvious examples of the federal government regulating employment conditions.

there is certainly lots of employment regulation that also happens at the state and local level, but why is that an argument in favor of not doing federal regulation?

eg, if I'm working in North Dakota and get injured on the job, then yeah the state government will adjudicate my worker's comp claim, and generally speaking the feds don't need to get involved.

however, if the company I work for in ND requires me to sign a non-compete contract that supposedly applies in all 50 states, and might prevent me from moving to South Dakota or another state - how is that not a concern of the federal government? this is interstate commerce, which the constitution very explicitly gives the federal government power to regulate.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Labor_Relations_Board

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupational_Safety_and_Health...

Both organizations are widely expected to vaporize, or at least become completely useless. As far as the administration is concerned, they are waste, fraud, and abuse.

To be fair, any R president would have done this. The pendulum goes back and fourth…

Let's be honest, the other party wasn't much better. Lots of talk about "womens healthcare", but not a peep about funding OSHA properly. Me? Brought in to clean up after a major incident that made the regional news and cost the taxpayer ~ 2 millions.

Many Republican Presidential candidates campaigned on promising this, but in office they are least tried to govern. The voters got fed up and voted for someone who genuinely did want to destroy it.

Disagree, I don’t think Trump campaigned on abolishing OSHA, for example. I had people telling me not to take some of his more “out there” statements too seriously. Others telling me democrats were inciting division for simply pointing out that Trump seemed inclined to destroy the federal government — not to mention the lies about Project 2025.

My point is that while many like these changes, others definitely didn’t expect it to go this far. So let’s not act like most Americans actually want this.

That’s my point, the difference here is not the policy goal, it’s the execution.

I see a lot of people acting as if the aims of Trump are some big departure. In fact they have been mainstream R goals for a long time.

Tangentially related:

"Republican Pressure to Disband OSHA Rises Amid Sweeping Trump Orders": https://www.inc.com/kit-eaton/republican-pressure-to-disband...

"NLRB Lacks Quorum to Exercise its Authority Following President Trump’s Removal of Member; The President Also Dismissed NLRB General Counsel Abruzzo": https://www.stinson.com/newsroom-publications-nlrb-lacks-quo...

I'm not sure why companies would want a patchwork of regulations across 50 different jurisdictions versus normalized national regulations.

Non-competes are anti-competitive nonsense, which is why the oligarchs love them.

It’s regulatory capture for large well resourced companies - keeps the smaller players off the field and unable to scale.

Nothing says anti-establishment like entrenching the existing establishment of massive corporations

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