| > I'm amazed that people sign contracts accepting this kind of restrictions to their lives. I believe he's talking about a contract between the companies, not contracts with individual employees. That may be different. An employer making an employee sign a contract saying that they won't work elsewhere without the employer's permission has obvious problems, such as the vast (usually) difference in bargaining power between an employer and an individual employee, and it gives the employer massive control over the employee's life. I believe that those are the main reasons many jurisdictions make such clauses unenforceable. In the case of two companies making a deal that company A will buy a service from company B and not hire away B's employees, you are much less likely to have such a great disparity in bargaining power. Unless it's a very small industry, B's employees probably have many other job opportunities in that industry besides A and other companies B has worked for. That suggests that there might not be such strong public policy reasons for make such contract unenforceable, especially if they have some time limit such as B's employees can't be hired by A for a year after working on B's service for A. Almost every court case I can recall hearing of in this area was either (1) contracts between companies and individual employees, not between companies, or (2) arrangements between competing companies to try to limit labor mobility to keep salaries down, which raised antitrust issues. |