The Federal Trade Commission
The United States Federal Trade Commission is taking comments from the public about whether to ban or limit noncompete clauses in employee contracts. If you are an American, please use your power to participate in your government. If you are not an American, you can still provide your voice.
Noncompete clauses are terms that say “if you leave this job, you can’t work for anyone else in the industry for...” in my mother’s case back in the 1970s, it was three years. Sometimes there’s a certain geographic radius.
Like many ridiculous things, it started with an understandible motive: The original idea was to prevent competing businesses from stealing company secrets by hiring competitors’ employees who had access to those secrets. Say, an engineer who knew the plans for a new product or a high-level exec who knew the business strategy for the coming year. But many of the companies using these clauses today are requiring them of all employees even if they don’t know anything confidential. The examples in this New York TImes article are a hairdresser, a doctor, and a car part salesperson. That means that the upshot of a noncompete today is not to protect an employer’s presumably hard-won intellectual property but to prevent employees from leaving and punish them if they do.
You know what I always say: Capitalism needs to be regulated to work. The core concept is that workers should compete for the best jobs and employees should compete for the best workers, which at least in theory means that employers have an incentive to pay well and provide non-toxic workplaces. These kinds of noncompete clauese create an artificial barrier to that. Healthy workplaces are a liberal value. Hard work and competition are conservative values. We should all be able to get behind this one.
When I was working freelance, I found clients trying to get me to sign contracts with noncompete clauses that could be interpreted as barring me from taking any other work even if they were not offering me full-time hours. Noncompete clauses have gotten out of hand.
