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0 pointsacdha8y ago0 comments

The problem comes from the market disparity: most employees need the job and have limited bargaining power or legal representation while the company has a whole legal team representing their interests. Similarly, the company has a lot more data points on terms and compensation than the prospective worker.

As a simple example, the Jimmy John's sandwich chain had a no-compete for their employees. Do you think the average person making subs is as comfortable walking away from a job as the company is telling them the terms aren't negotiable?

My favorite fix would simply to be requiring full compensation for the entire term. Intel would pay an architect to sit on the beach rather than work for AMD but nobody would think of trying that for the average developer.

0 comments

_red8y ago

>As a simple example, the Jimmy John's sandwich chain had a no-compete for their employees. Do you think the average person making subs is as comfortable walking away from a job as the company is telling them the terms aren't negotiable?

Its true they did have that contract. However it was never enforced and once news of it broke they dropped it.

It would like never been enforced since its clearly unlawful. Any legal contract must have 5 parts: (a) Offer, (b) Consideration, (c) Term, (d) Good Faith, and (e) Acceptance.

The "Good Faith" provision means that no part of any contract is either for one part or the other. The contract is implied to be "equal" in all parts. Such a tact of getting low-paid workers to sign non-competes clearly violates this, thus why it was basically unenforceable.

Now, just because some company tried to write a dumb contract, should we make all contracts illegal?

acdhaOP8y ago

We don't know whether they tried to use it and reached an agreement covered by an NDA (do you accept or spend 10X the amount on legal fees?). Similarly, we don't know whether it was ever threatened as part of a labor dispute: I first heard about it in conjunction with the class action lawsuit about unpaid overtime and it's very easy to imagine that the same manager trying to do that wouldn't hesitate to threaten someone's ability to find another job, secure in the knowledge that nobody working that job has the resources to lawyer up.

That power disparity is the fundamental flaw in your argument. The theory you're repeating sounds great as long as the parties have roughly equal power and knowledge, which just isn't true.

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