My sister worked at Subway and had to sign a noncompete that she wouldn’t work at another sandwich shop for three years. Are they really afraid she’s going to steal their secrets of placing meat on bread?
The more cynical will certainly assume malice, that the company did this to keep you from leaving. It particularly at the time it was not hard at all to find new fast food workers, and I am a firm believer in Hanlon’s Razor and never assume malice when incompetence will do. I genuinely think the explanation could just be Subway’s lawyers were like “everyone else is doing noncompetes”.
Now they also won't have the legal ability to simply open a new sandwich shop right next to Subway.
I.e. you're imagining that non-competes are there to protect proprietary know-how.
That's mostly true for some companies, but for others (e.g. Subway) it's a wedge guarding them against the collective action of their employees.
Legally speaking, that is often the case. Many states require a noncompete to have a “legitimate business reason”, and proprietary knowledge is the most common legitimate reason used.
I suspect judges in most states would invalidate a noncompete for a sandwich shop worker.
The legal purpose of these clauses is to keep high paid workers from stealing customer lists or business secrets. The legal system does tend to frown on them being used for rank and file.
Many employers just use them as an empty threat to manipulate people, because they know few people are going to hire a lawyer over it.
I mean, even from a practical perspective, noncompetes are pretty weak unless the employee is the kind of person who would make the news when they join a new company. You can always leave a company and tell them nothing about where you’re going. A subway franchise ain’t gonna hire some PI to figure out where a former front-line employee got a new job.
Just having the piece of paper to wave around is valuable even if it's totally unenforceable.
Which is why, at a minimum, any lawyer who participates in drafting something like that should be removed from the profession. And most likely there should be criminal penalties for the corporate management involved.
> Many employers just use them as an empty threat to manipulate people, because they know few people are going to hire a lawyer over it.
These noncompetes do work well as an empty threat.
Although I suspect the majority of sandwich shop workers or managers aren’t paying any attention to the language in their onboarding paperwork, and are just going through the motions.
I would like to see limits on this, but I’m not sure there’s a way to penalize lawyers for this, because they often are not the ones deciding who to hand these contracts to. Usually businesses have a lawyer draft up a general agreement, and then lazy business management just hands the same one to everyone from the VP to the janitor. That’s not really the lawyer’s doing.