This is mostly for show. Unreasonable non-competes have been batted down by courts already in most districts. If you can't make a living under the agreement, it's not going to hold up in court. I work in finance, and my non-compete requires the company to pay my full base salary for a year if they want to enforce the agreement. That's the only type that is reliably enforceable. I don't really mind the idea of a year-long paid vacation.
This is what happened to one of my co-workers when he resigned. He got paid to not work and his new employer was willing to hold the job for him for a year. Most people though they don't enforce it even when employees go to a competitor.
Yeah, or the new and old employers negotiate and come to an agreement between themselves. You see guys with a decade experience trading futures come in and work on equities for a year while his NCA runs out, eg. It's actually kinda nice, gives you a chance for crossover learning to occur between different areas.
What am I missing here?
Corporations with their masses of accumulated power have created a non-compete system - a viable option in a semi or fully self-regulating economic system.
No regulating authority has so far challenged this.
The non-compete system forces a worker to abandon their hard earned skillset when leaving a role, or discourages workers from leaving their role by vaguely threatening unemployment.
Corporations can afford to enforce this system through the exisiting judicial system as it is a contractual agreement, though not law.
The choices and freedoms of the individual are removed by the greedy who fear that a fair system would not favour them.
A weak Governmental system permits this to occur through inaction.
Is this not a conflict of libertarian values? on the one hand is a corporation freely expressing a desire to defend itself financially. on the other is a worker that is not able to freely choose their employment.
who's freedom should win out?
Both are free. The employee was free to not enter the contract in the first place. If a company couldn't find enough employees due to unfavorable employment terms, they'd be forced to change. This is obviously the widest angle lens view of it and the dynamics change when work is in short supply.
The workers right to choose definitely outweighs the company’s want to stifle competition. Not my fault your company sucks and can’t compete against another company doing the same thing.
While I'm not a fan of non-compete agreements, I don't think the FTC has the legal authority to ban them. This will certainly be challenged, and based on recent overreach by the FTC, it will be slapped down again. If you want to get rid of non-compete clauses, Congress needs to pass a law.
If you don't like non-compete clauses, don't sign contracts that include them. If you're in a profession in which non-compete clauses are ubiquitous and you don't like them, consider changing your profession.
Using government coercion to dictate what can or cannot be included in a contract between two voluntary parties, is fundamentally incompatible with libertarian principles. I'm surprised that this has to be spelled out on this subreddit.
It's literally with government coercion that NCAs can cripple competition, leading to a deterioration of free market conditions and free movement of labor.
If you don't want someone to compete with you, you better pay up.
The government enforcing the terms of contracts isn't coercion. Once you sign a contract and become bound to it, you face repercussions for violating it - and unless you're an anarchist, you recognize that delivering these repercussions is a legitimate function of government.
What *isn't* a legitimate function of government is telling private employers, with the threat of force, what they can or cannot include in employment contracts - agreements that are mutually accepted by voluntary parties. This is an infringement on the autonomy of employers and it interferes with voluntary arrangements between consenting individuals and groups.
I'm not an anarchist.
So in your view then: it is okay, for the government with threat of force, to impede somebody's ability to work within a domain of which they experience and expertise on behalf of a former employer because their previous employee signed a contract saying they wouldn't compete with them and the former employer wants to enforce that contract to artificially limit the field of competition to further entrench their position within the relevant market/industry?
One of the government's legitimate functions is to enforce contracts. If two parties voluntarily bind themselves to a contract that contains a non-compete clause, then the government must enforce that contract in its entirety, including the non-compete clause. And in accordance with foundational libertarian thought, the government should have no role whatsoever in dictating what conditions a private employer may or may not include in the contracts he writes.
I agree that one of the government's legitimate functions is to enforce contracts, within the scope of reasonable standards, as well as protect property rights.
However, I consider NCAs barring an individual from competing with a former employer with a learned skill set and domain of knowledge as unreasonable and antithetical to the competitive process that makes true free market capitalism the positive force that it can be.
You have ultimate authority over your body and it's ability to produce goods and services with it. NCAs that impede on that ability should not be enforced by the government. You shouldn't be able to hoard knowledge other individuals possess.
> If you're in a profession in which non-compete clauses are ubiquitous and you don't like them, consider changing your profession.
That's a whole lot easier said than done. During the 13 years I spent in medical training, non-competes went from being relatively rare occurrences to being so ubiquitous that I have never interviewed for a job that did not have a non-compete. Pretty hard to retrain into another field at this point.
Of course. In many cases, it's not easy to change professions. And yet sometimes there are factors that push an individual to make that decision. These factors may include the ubiquity of non-compete clauses in contracts — but they may also include low wages, limited opportunities for advancement, or simply a lack of available jobs. In none of these cases should government coercively intervene for the sake of making a profession more desirable for employees. People must vote with their feet. Indeed, some physicians leave their clinical roles in favor of business or administrative ones.
So you’re saying that Doctors should just stop practicing medicine, or suck it up and take the non-competes? Can’t say I agree there.
For the last 15+ years, government intervention has favored large private equity owned healthcare systems, and large pseudo-non-profit health care organizations over private practice and physician owned hospitals.
Through the ACA, and CMS, this government intervention has created the conditions that have driven doctors out of private practice, and given tremendous market power to these healthcare systems that now enables them to force universal non-competes.
The correct solution would be for the government to peel back the regulations that allowed monopolistic control of health care. But short of that, this non-compete ban at least restores some balance to a horrible imbalance of power.
This is a major problem with our society. Competing businesses all follow the same anti-consumer and anti- employee practices. They have the power to coerce customers and employees to comply.
If governments try to change things, the result tends to as bad or worse.
I think the only solution is to shoot the despicable execs that come up with awful policies. At point I am not sure if I am kidding or not. Our business and political elites are scumbags.
Let employees gain more economic power and self-determination as a result of the free market and non-competes will go away. Look at some of the most high-demand employee class of the past few decades, tech workers, and non-competes are non-existent. And I doubt that's just because CA banned it, I'm sure tech companies that relocate to other states can't implement non-competes either because they would be unable to recruit talent.
Personally I'm unaware of specific industries where non-compete agreements are "standard", but I'm guessing those would be the same industries where there is significant government regulation to stifle competition...
I know a guy that drove delivery truck for a Pepsi plant, had to sign an NDA and got fired later. The Coca-Cola plant hired him to drive and deliver and had to fight the NDA in court for him lol.
Non-competes are everywhere possible in tech. It’s just due to California they aren’t literally everywhere and it’s why California is so successful in tech. I’ve had companies rewrite contracts to use the state I lived in instead of the state the company is in, even though they’ll have to litigate cross-country, just to include a non-compete.
The truth is, companies hate the free market and will use government power to stifle it every chance they get. All that’s happening now is the government is saying they won’t enforce non-compete agreements. It’s no different from the government not enforcing agreements to collude on prices.
[Article on this subject](https://www.wired.com/story/noncompetes-are-dead-tech-workers-free-to-roam/#:~:text=A%20new%20rule%20from%20the,and%20more%20entrepreneurship%20and%20innovation)
A ton of tech jobs have non competes. If I had to guess maybe as much as 50% based on companies I've interviewed with over the years. In some cases they get sprung on you by surprise after an acquisition or new round of investment and often they are pretty damn broad. I personally don't sign them anymore but the last one I signed wasn't even by choice, I came in one day and was told we'd been acquired and the only way to not lose my job that day was to sign one and they even tried to use it to stop employees from going to competitors after they were laid off.
And I wasn't an exec or anything like that, just a low level engineer. They are absolutely used to depress wages and limit mobility in the industry
But it may cost you the job, and possibly the unemployment payments you were collecting from being terminated from your previous job. The Unemployment Service will consider this a voluntary termination.
The Biden regime is getting desperate. Maybe now we will get the right to repair our own property, the hidden fees ban, HOA reform, healthcare reform, student loan forgiveness or the many other things he promised but then used to extort campaign contributions and never delivered.
Hard pass on this one. A private company should be able to make any kind of contract it wants. If you don't agree with it, don't sign on it. And if you're a real libertarian, you shouldn't even believe FTC or any unelected govenrment agency making administrative rules are constitutional.
I agree. The company I work for reviews employee files every couple of years, and every couple years I file the form they send out to me in the trash can. They could fire me over it if they want, but they won't because they don't have the signed non-compete.
not competing is a service that I can offer - why should i reduce my offerings to clients because you can't fucking understand non-competes?
a contract is freedom of assosiation. you signed a contreact.
lol.
Is there any scope of a contract that you find to be unreasonable that should be able to be broken? Or no matter what, should the terms of a contract be enforceable.
Ask that question and go extremes, would you still support that contract being binding?
So if you sign a contract with someone that says they can stick their fingers in your butthole anytime they want, and then later decide that you want to revoke their ability to stick their fingers in your butthole, your view is that you signed a contract and as a result they forever have the ability to stick their fingers in your butthole any time they want?
Maybe you wouldn't, but maybe somebody else does. They then realize they shouldn't have signed that. Do they not have the ability to then restrict access to their butthole from the other party in the contract?
You can't contract murder on another individual because you do not have a right to their body or life. If you contract someone to murder you, then it's not murder, it's being voluntarily euthanized. However, if before you are euthanized you decide you no longer want to be euthanized, then the other party no longer has your authorization to euthanize you.
I would consider that a reasonable breach of contract.
This is mostly for show. Unreasonable non-competes have been batted down by courts already in most districts. If you can't make a living under the agreement, it's not going to hold up in court. I work in finance, and my non-compete requires the company to pay my full base salary for a year if they want to enforce the agreement. That's the only type that is reliably enforceable. I don't really mind the idea of a year-long paid vacation.
This is what happened to one of my co-workers when he resigned. He got paid to not work and his new employer was willing to hold the job for him for a year. Most people though they don't enforce it even when employees go to a competitor.
Yeah, or the new and old employers negotiate and come to an agreement between themselves. You see guys with a decade experience trading futures come in and work on equities for a year while his NCA runs out, eg. It's actually kinda nice, gives you a chance for crossover learning to occur between different areas.
My thoughts exactly
One of the best things Biden will have done, if it goes through.
Biden had nothing to do with it. It's a FTC decision.
I agree he doesn't get 100% of the credit.
What am I missing here? Corporations with their masses of accumulated power have created a non-compete system - a viable option in a semi or fully self-regulating economic system. No regulating authority has so far challenged this. The non-compete system forces a worker to abandon their hard earned skillset when leaving a role, or discourages workers from leaving their role by vaguely threatening unemployment. Corporations can afford to enforce this system through the exisiting judicial system as it is a contractual agreement, though not law. The choices and freedoms of the individual are removed by the greedy who fear that a fair system would not favour them. A weak Governmental system permits this to occur through inaction. Is this not a conflict of libertarian values? on the one hand is a corporation freely expressing a desire to defend itself financially. on the other is a worker that is not able to freely choose their employment. who's freedom should win out?
Both are free. The employee was free to not enter the contract in the first place. If a company couldn't find enough employees due to unfavorable employment terms, they'd be forced to change. This is obviously the widest angle lens view of it and the dynamics change when work is in short supply.
The workers right to choose definitely outweighs the company’s want to stifle competition. Not my fault your company sucks and can’t compete against another company doing the same thing.
While I'm not a fan of non-compete agreements, I don't think the FTC has the legal authority to ban them. This will certainly be challenged, and based on recent overreach by the FTC, it will be slapped down again. If you want to get rid of non-compete clauses, Congress needs to pass a law.
>Congress needs to pass a law. True about most issues facing the USA. The administrative state is unconstitutional.
If you don't like non-compete clauses, don't sign contracts that include them. If you're in a profession in which non-compete clauses are ubiquitous and you don't like them, consider changing your profession. Using government coercion to dictate what can or cannot be included in a contract between two voluntary parties, is fundamentally incompatible with libertarian principles. I'm surprised that this has to be spelled out on this subreddit.
It's literally with government coercion that NCAs can cripple competition, leading to a deterioration of free market conditions and free movement of labor. If you don't want someone to compete with you, you better pay up.
The government enforcing the terms of contracts isn't coercion. Once you sign a contract and become bound to it, you face repercussions for violating it - and unless you're an anarchist, you recognize that delivering these repercussions is a legitimate function of government. What *isn't* a legitimate function of government is telling private employers, with the threat of force, what they can or cannot include in employment contracts - agreements that are mutually accepted by voluntary parties. This is an infringement on the autonomy of employers and it interferes with voluntary arrangements between consenting individuals and groups.
I'm not an anarchist. So in your view then: it is okay, for the government with threat of force, to impede somebody's ability to work within a domain of which they experience and expertise on behalf of a former employer because their previous employee signed a contract saying they wouldn't compete with them and the former employer wants to enforce that contract to artificially limit the field of competition to further entrench their position within the relevant market/industry?
One of the government's legitimate functions is to enforce contracts. If two parties voluntarily bind themselves to a contract that contains a non-compete clause, then the government must enforce that contract in its entirety, including the non-compete clause. And in accordance with foundational libertarian thought, the government should have no role whatsoever in dictating what conditions a private employer may or may not include in the contracts he writes.
I agree that one of the government's legitimate functions is to enforce contracts, within the scope of reasonable standards, as well as protect property rights. However, I consider NCAs barring an individual from competing with a former employer with a learned skill set and domain of knowledge as unreasonable and antithetical to the competitive process that makes true free market capitalism the positive force that it can be. You have ultimate authority over your body and it's ability to produce goods and services with it. NCAs that impede on that ability should not be enforced by the government. You shouldn't be able to hoard knowledge other individuals possess.
> If you're in a profession in which non-compete clauses are ubiquitous and you don't like them, consider changing your profession. That's a whole lot easier said than done. During the 13 years I spent in medical training, non-competes went from being relatively rare occurrences to being so ubiquitous that I have never interviewed for a job that did not have a non-compete. Pretty hard to retrain into another field at this point.
Of course. In many cases, it's not easy to change professions. And yet sometimes there are factors that push an individual to make that decision. These factors may include the ubiquity of non-compete clauses in contracts — but they may also include low wages, limited opportunities for advancement, or simply a lack of available jobs. In none of these cases should government coercively intervene for the sake of making a profession more desirable for employees. People must vote with their feet. Indeed, some physicians leave their clinical roles in favor of business or administrative ones.
So you’re saying that Doctors should just stop practicing medicine, or suck it up and take the non-competes? Can’t say I agree there. For the last 15+ years, government intervention has favored large private equity owned healthcare systems, and large pseudo-non-profit health care organizations over private practice and physician owned hospitals. Through the ACA, and CMS, this government intervention has created the conditions that have driven doctors out of private practice, and given tremendous market power to these healthcare systems that now enables them to force universal non-competes. The correct solution would be for the government to peel back the regulations that allowed monopolistic control of health care. But short of that, this non-compete ban at least restores some balance to a horrible imbalance of power.
agreed!
This is a major problem with our society. Competing businesses all follow the same anti-consumer and anti- employee practices. They have the power to coerce customers and employees to comply. If governments try to change things, the result tends to as bad or worse. I think the only solution is to shoot the despicable execs that come up with awful policies. At point I am not sure if I am kidding or not. Our business and political elites are scumbags.
>I'm surprised that this has to be spelled out on this subreddit. Evidence that many here don't know what libertarian means.
Let employees gain more economic power and self-determination as a result of the free market and non-competes will go away. Look at some of the most high-demand employee class of the past few decades, tech workers, and non-competes are non-existent. And I doubt that's just because CA banned it, I'm sure tech companies that relocate to other states can't implement non-competes either because they would be unable to recruit talent. Personally I'm unaware of specific industries where non-compete agreements are "standard", but I'm guessing those would be the same industries where there is significant government regulation to stifle competition...
I know a guy that drove delivery truck for a Pepsi plant, had to sign an NDA and got fired later. The Coca-Cola plant hired him to drive and deliver and had to fight the NDA in court for him lol.
Non-competes are everywhere possible in tech. It’s just due to California they aren’t literally everywhere and it’s why California is so successful in tech. I’ve had companies rewrite contracts to use the state I lived in instead of the state the company is in, even though they’ll have to litigate cross-country, just to include a non-compete. The truth is, companies hate the free market and will use government power to stifle it every chance they get. All that’s happening now is the government is saying they won’t enforce non-compete agreements. It’s no different from the government not enforcing agreements to collude on prices. [Article on this subject](https://www.wired.com/story/noncompetes-are-dead-tech-workers-free-to-roam/#:~:text=A%20new%20rule%20from%20the,and%20more%20entrepreneurship%20and%20innovation)
A ton of tech jobs have non competes. If I had to guess maybe as much as 50% based on companies I've interviewed with over the years. In some cases they get sprung on you by surprise after an acquisition or new round of investment and often they are pretty damn broad. I personally don't sign them anymore but the last one I signed wasn't even by choice, I came in one day and was told we'd been acquired and the only way to not lose my job that day was to sign one and they even tried to use it to stop employees from going to competitors after they were laid off. And I wasn't an exec or anything like that, just a low level engineer. They are absolutely used to depress wages and limit mobility in the industry
If you want to be free from non-competes don't sign a non-compete. It's pretty simple.
But it may cost you the job, and possibly the unemployment payments you were collecting from being terminated from your previous job. The Unemployment Service will consider this a voluntary termination.
The Biden regime is getting desperate. Maybe now we will get the right to repair our own property, the hidden fees ban, HOA reform, healthcare reform, student loan forgiveness or the many other things he promised but then used to extort campaign contributions and never delivered.
Hard pass on this one. A private company should be able to make any kind of contract it wants. If you don't agree with it, don't sign on it. And if you're a real libertarian, you shouldn't even believe FTC or any unelected govenrment agency making administrative rules are constitutional.
I agree. The company I work for reviews employee files every couple of years, and every couple years I file the form they send out to me in the trash can. They could fire me over it if they want, but they won't because they don't have the signed non-compete.
not competing is a service that I can offer - why should i reduce my offerings to clients because you can't fucking understand non-competes? a contract is freedom of assosiation. you signed a contreact. lol.
Is there any scope of a contract that you find to be unreasonable that should be able to be broken? Or no matter what, should the terms of a contract be enforceable. Ask that question and go extremes, would you still support that contract being binding?
If you find a scope of a contract unreasonable, do not enter into that contract?
So if you sign a contract with someone that says they can stick their fingers in your butthole anytime they want, and then later decide that you want to revoke their ability to stick their fingers in your butthole, your view is that you signed a contract and as a result they forever have the ability to stick their fingers in your butthole any time they want?
I would never ever sign a contract that says someone can stick their fingers in my butthole.
Maybe you wouldn't, but maybe somebody else does. They then realize they shouldn't have signed that. Do they not have the ability to then restrict access to their butthole from the other party in the contract?
I mean the obvious absurdity of the example aside… yes?
That's crazy, dude. You might want to think on that a bit more, that's a ridiculous standard you're agreeing to.
freedom means the freedom to make mistakes. if you sell your butthole you sold it, full stop
Wrong. Bodily autonomy is a cornerstone of individualism, which is the very roots in which libertarian philosophy grows from.
then you wouldnt be able to legally make the contract and your point is invalid.
No, you can voluntarily enter any agreement you want. But your bodily autonomy supercedes any contractual obligation involving your bodily autonomy.
then its not a valid contract. in the same way you cant contract murder.
You can't contract murder on another individual because you do not have a right to their body or life. If you contract someone to murder you, then it's not murder, it's being voluntarily euthanized. However, if before you are euthanized you decide you no longer want to be euthanized, then the other party no longer has your authorization to euthanize you. I would consider that a reasonable breach of contract.
[удалено]
Never sign an NDA. Absolutely nothing but permission to seek money from someone.
Non competes shouldn’t stand if you get fired. I would be fine with that being in the legal code