[taneq]

If there's no notice then that's pretty crap. Every employment contract I've ever (in Australia) had has specified some fixed amount of notice required on either side to terminate employment (usually 2-4 weeks, sometimes increasing with time spent at the company) plus the company has to pay out any accrued annual leave, long service leave etc. This stuff is owed regardless of why the employee leaves.

Even if they tell you to go home and not come back, they still have to pay out the notice period and other outstanding amounts. It usually works out that you're covered for a month or two before you start to lose out financially.

I've never actually encountered it myself (and in fact just had to look it up [1]) but if you're made redundant then there's also a mandatory redundancy payout which starts at 4 weeks' pay for an employee who's been there between 1 and 2 years, and scales up to 16 weeks for employees of 10 years or over.

(The one time I've been 'made redundant' it was never official, I was working for a games company and they just kind of stopped paying us so we eventually just kind of stopped going. Lots of people lost significant amounts of money in owed wages.)

Edit: As for noncompetes, I think they're pretty universally held to be unenforceable attempts to bluster employees into believing they can't leave, but I can't imagine a company which actually tried to enforce one would ever be able to hire quality staff again. It'd be suicide.

[1] https://www.ilo.org/dyn/eplex/termdisplay.severancePay?p_lan...