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.
Unless you have the monetary means to bring the issue to court (and see it through to the end), any clause like this will effectively be a law.
> 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.
For a total BS claim, it usually doesn’t take more than calling their bluff. Or just ignoring it.
Employers usually just bet on people just following the language and not challenging it because they think it’s valid and they think they’ll have to go to court.
In reality, a business doesn’t want to spend tens of thousands of dollars on something their own lawyer says they’re going to lose.
Nobody is taking $12/hr unskilled employees to court over noncompetes. Lighting cash on fire is a more efficient and fun way to accomplish the same.
And food service is horrifically abusive.
And yes, the noncompetes ARE enforced, because it's not about you - it's about keeping all the employees/slaves in line, and knowing there is no other place they can turn to working.
This whole thread is so laughable. As a former Subway employee, I worked there cause there was nowhere else. Pay was a laugh. And if you think there's legal services for the poverty masses, then you must be smoking something REALLY good.
EDIT: oh look, the -1 brigade of people who had silver spoons since birth. Just how many of you climbed from homelessness and menial jobs??
This is much more often going to be true because the dispute was never made in the first place, because of the risk it would entail to a low wage worker. They cannot afford—for reasons of time, money, health, education—to even threaten to take an employer to court.
Your argument sounds logical, but is unfortunately unaware of how real world pressures distort systems for recourse.
No, but they might use The Work Number or a similar service.
However, the reality here is not likely that a sandwich shop employee would have to “threaten to take an employer to court”.
The most likely scenario is that the hiring manager doesn’t even realize that boilerplate is in their employment agreement. The second most likely is that the employer grumbles about the employee leaving and that’s as far as it goes.