> 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.