What you're trying to say is there's limited alternatives. (The most obvious alternative is to not take the job)
Pretending like the situation is that extreme isn’t helping anyone.
All I’m doing is calling you out that when you join a company, you’re voluntarily signing all of the contracts. It’s not some kind of involuntary act of slavery. A responsible adult is presented a contract and chooses to sign it. That’s the opposite of involuntary.
Your argument is it’s involuntary.
That’s what we were debating. I wasn’t debating the contents of the contract. I personally don’t see a major need for non-competes and is overkill in almost all cases.
I’m simply tired of the “I’m a victim!” mindset of blaming others for their own actions. It’s your fault if you signed a shitty employment contract. Next time read the fine print, or don’t sign it.
I am not making the situation "extreme," either. If anything, the situation is even more extreme than I am making it out to be.
1. A company can usually go without hiring people than a worker can go without making mortgage payments or issuing rent. In the United States, that includes basic access to medical care.
2. Companies have large legal departments advising them on how to craft language and the boundaries of the law. Most workers don’t even want to pay a lawyer to review a contract knowing that they’ll almost always be told it’s standard and there are no exceptions.
3. People join a company when the relationship is good, and aren’t thinking about how it could be sour. This often includes verbal assurances about things like this which are not written into contracts, and a change in management which provides reason to leave also invalidates all of your assumption about who you entered into the agreement with. If you signed with “only a direct competitor” that probably seemed more reasonable at the time than when the new boss / acquiring company decides that since you work on software anyone else who works on software is a competitor. A lot of open source developers went through this with IP grabs which were agreed to cover only their new employer’s direct business but then a change in ownership meant that someone was trying to claim their hobby game or even non-software IP.
Yes, ideally everyone would know about this and refuse to deal with abusive companies but the reason we have laws is because that’s not how the works has ever worked. Providing clear boundaries is useful both because because society is healthier if even people who make minor mistakes or trust the wrong person are protected and because it levels the field for everyone. If the law says no non-competes, people don’t need to generate millions in revenue for lawyers telling them why company A is offering less than company B, and company C is not going to try to bully their existing employees into accepting a worse deal. It’s the same reason we say “your boss can’t demand sex” / “teachers can’t have sex with students” because that avoids having to individually litigate each case to decide whether some power gradient was crossed. Simple boundaries are enormously useful, and in this case there’s really no downside (New York would love it if banning non-competes devastated their economy into California’s).
It's not black or white. You don't have to be held at gunpoint for something to be involuntary, and nobody is ever so free of concerns that everything they do is entirely voluntary.
But HCE’s who deal with intellectual data (not burgers) all day long? Maybe, maybe not.
The point is it’s a choice to sign these contracts. Not every company makes you sign one. If it’s important to you, ask about it upfront in the interview process so it doesn’t turn into a “life or death” decision after you’ve accepted a verbal offer.
That may or may not be true, but it's not the situation workers are in. Have you looked at unemployment rates in the US recently?
> Not to mention, such agreements are often not stated up front as part of the job description.
Yes, but they are part of the contract that you can read, before you sign.
You are mixing up gardening leave with non-competes. Typically, they have both.
(Eg for a recent job, I had six months of gardening leave, when they paid my base salary, and then another six months of non-compete.)
> [...] but with regards to the article I doubt anyone is forced to choose between working for a trading firm and starving.
Indeed! We don't need welfare for well-off folks. They can fend for themselves, and we can focus limited resources on the poor (and those who want the help).
Again, my point wasn’t that the power is distributed 100:0 but that it varies a lot and only a small percentage of the workforce enjoys the odds being in their favor.
You have a hard time convincing anyone that the choice is "take this job or die" for most people.