The company is offering extra weeks of pay in return for not attacking them.
Why is this different than getting paid to do your job or meet a contract in other respects?
Why is this different than getting paid to do your job or meet a contract in other respects?
The flip side: Offer two weeks notice, but only if they agree to speak of you on your terms afterward. No company signs that. They would be liable for anything anyone in the company ever said about you, forever.
It's also exceptionally vague and even if it only applies to lies spoken by the employee, it can still have a chilling effect on the truth.
You can forego the two weeks severance if it isn't worth it and you really want to trash them.
Having been both on the employee and the employer side of things, as an employer it really sucks to do something nice that you don't have to like give someone a severance package and then have them be a jerk by trying to hurt you in some way.
So unless you want to cherry pick extremely unlikely situations, this separation agreement clause is a no-op and probably worth signing.
If an employer isn't required to do the same in California then there's not much to complain about.
Is this the case?
([1] There is legislation that comes into play if you let enough people go at the same time that its considered a "layoff". But it doesn't come into play for an individual termination)
If you write a public review 3 years later about how a product from that company sucks, that could be held as a breach of this contract you signed, and would at the very least be a non-free legal headache for you. A headache that would likely cost you much more than the company to deal with, to boot.