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.

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.

More easily now that the nrlb rescinded those bans.

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.

/s

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.

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/

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.

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...

In my case Minnesota.

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 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...

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.

Double-speak is everywhere at this point. Every party, left, right, or center, uses it. I suppose that's the point, though, to normalize people to it.

Oh, this content makes me want to revive my dict-heads website idea, but unfortunately it's a total known unknown.

> So no your complaint is not calibrated. Sorry.

Well, you are wrong.

I'll start with your last comment. Go read my post again and understand the degree of the example given. This was an extreme case. This individual required a little over a year of training and knew virtually nothing about the job coming in.

Everyone needs to learn something at every new job, of course. In many ways that's what makes it fun. There's a distinction between learning something and having to be trained for a year. And that distinction is huge both in terms of the time and money invested on that person.

> Spending time to train an employee is an expected cost for the employers.

Of course.

> It is not that they steal from you corporate secrets that the competitors would leverage against you.

Not sure where this comes from, I didn't say this.

> It is a minimal time risk that the employer takes, to make productive an employee for them.

The key word there is "minimal". Once again, in my case, we invested a year and a serious amount of money training the person. It was a mistake to hire him. Plain and simple.

That's the point that readers seem to miss. Let me try to do a better job spelling it out:

Without a contract that obligates an employee to stay for a specific length of time, there's a limit function on how much you can invest on that employee in the short term due to the risk of the employee leaving your company for a competitor.

Would you buy a used car that required constant work to fix it for a year and yet the engine isn't guaranteed to last more than a year? Likely not. Same thing.

Because of this, companies will generally avoid hiring "newbies" unless they have to or have a value proposition that's sexy enough that they will likely stay. For example, SpaceX is full of 25-ish year old engineers who are truly excited to work there. They come to the company with very little --if any-- experience. They need to learn everything. Some leave. The vast majority stay. Lots of them pull the ejection cord at the 5-year vesting point.

So, it is a training ground, yet, there's a reasonable assurance that perhaps 80% of the newbies will stay. There are only so many sexy companies like that. Most small to medium businesses do not carry that clout.

In that context, one can understand why an non-compete with a limited term can make sense in the eyes of an employer. Before I am verbally eviscerated, I have already said, multiple times, that I don't like them and do not advise anyone to accept one. I am simply saying that I understand at least one scenario under which they might make sense.

> Think about the risks that the employees take for the company (they are not just time risks). They have to relocate themselves, and even worse move their entire family and kids away from their friends & schools, sell their houses often at loss / break leases, and then join your venture with just at will employment contract, which means that at any-time you can just tell them to go f themselves.

Once again, these are things I did not say.

The employee I was referring to had to drive 30 minutes. In fact, our office was closer to him than his prior job, which was one hour away.

The vast majority of jobs do not require such extreme measures. In the case of most small to medium businesses, they cannot afford to trade in the relocation markets. That's an entirely different dynamic and one that I am very sensitive to.

I have someone right now who has to move his family from Arizona to join us. We are renting a house for him and his family for an entire year and covering all related expenses. I have insisted that they do not sell their home until they are sure this move will make sense to them long term. Being in CA, there is no non-compete, and I am perfectly fine with it because I am not hiring a newbie that will require a massive amount of training before they can add value to the organization.

There are degrees.

The point you and others missed is the idea that there are scenarios under which non-compete agreements could find some justification. I will generalize one to be an apprenticeship position. The end result of not having this as a legal tool is that there are entire classes of businesses who have to --out of self-preservation-- take the position of "let someone else train them". That's just reality, like it or not.

Next time you read job postings where you say "Damn! I know I can do that job, but they want 5 years of experience and I only have 2!" think about the possibility that they are thinking "We cannot spend the time or money to train someone". If, on the other hand, they had the legal ability to offer newbies the ability to learn on the job in exchange for committing to a minimum and reasonable term of employment, the job specification might change.

You managed to miss the entire point of the post.

It is obvious from your simplistic comment that you need to acquire a much broader perspective before being able to interject with value in a conversation on this topic.

Ah, I fell prey to the double negative and reread the article. I'll leave my comment for histories sake.

Do you have to sign noncompete before joining the job or after?

If before, why not find another job? Is anyone forcing you to accept a job with noncompete?

If after, they should be banned.

TFA notes that it may not have been declared legal. Rescinding a memo doesn't reverse existing case law; the meaning of said case law is subject to some disagreements (that the memo sought to clarify/remove).

Few people know much labor history now. The era when unions could put a thousand people on a factory gate to prevent scabs from entering is long gone. That's how the auto companies were unionized.

2 parts plutonic quartz, 1 part cesium, and 1 water bottle

Joking aside a lot of LLM's won't even let you ask critical questions about unions. They may have become more lenient in recent versions, but I know early llama and chatgpt models wouldn't answer questions about decertification of unions, or whether they could taxed. You could never get an LLM to say anything critical of a union just by using system prompts.

I'm highly skeptical of the idea there are a bunch of conservative bots running around, you would, at a minimum, have to retrain an existing model to get them to argue in favor of most right-wing topics. You certainly couldn't do it with system prompts.