[toomuchtodo]

This is not enough of an excuse to encumber someone from earning a living elsewhere.

> “Employers need to get creative about how to impose restrictions to protect themselves against individuals” in whom they have made significant investments, or who have been allowed access to trade secrets, to protect themselves against such employees leaving, said Maxwell N. Shaffer, a partner with Holland & Knight LLP in Denver.

The sort of healthy employee-employer relationship that retains talent.

[lazide]

What is being banned are non-competes that don’t pay someone to not compete.

There are legitimate reasons for actual non-competes in many of these cases, and CAlifornia for instance just requires you pay them for it.

Which in such a situation seems justified.

[toomuchtodo]

I agree. If you want to pay someone to sit on the bench because that has value to you ("Garden Leave"), I support that. If you want to twist their arm because you have power as an employer, nope. That's what labor law and regulation are for.

Lots of examples of malicious employers doing the latter, as you'll note the sentiment throughout the thread comments and laws intending to patch this bug in statute.

[michaelmrose]

Why let them have that at all. The honest true is instead of worrying what strategy most balances the interests of 99.9% of people and a few whiny rich people we could spend that time creating actual value. Whereas if you want to continue on with the Rube Goldberg device we ought to force them to pay not employers present rate but market rate and cost of foregone opportunity.

You might say that's incredibly unaffordable but that is the point. Otherwise the employer is robbing society of the value created in addition to stealing the difference between present rate and market rate + foregone opportunities.

[lazide]

Because employees can be shitty people too. See my comment upthread about an up close and personal view I had to one such shitty employee.

What you seem to be advocating is to never allow a company<-> employee to have a non compete clause, even if the company is happy to pay for it.

Which yikes. Do you think what Levandowski did with Waymo/Uber helped anyone? Including ‘society’ overall?

[michaelmrose]

I don't care what they are happy to pay for. There are plenty of other tools available to protect the interests of companies. For example Levandowski stole trade secrets and is being sued for 9 figures and indicted. You couldn't have picked a worse example of the need for post employment non-competes if you tried.

Likewise your other example is an employee taking an employees money and their customers at the same time. It would have been sufficient to bar him from competing and working against the employers interests WHILE he was there.

If he had quit and called prior customers and said I know you do business with blank but I can do better would that really have been wrong?

[prirun]

> What is being banned are non-competes that don’t pay someone to not compete.

Employers will just say "the no-compete compensations is built in to your pay".

[lazide]

Which is what is banned in California. If someone wants an enforceable non-compete, they need to pay them (fairly and explicitly) for the time they’re not allowed to compete.

[lovich]

They can say anything, but the behavior has gotten enough voter anger to make politicians view this as something to regulate, so their opinion on the matter is quickly going to lose any weight

[PeterisP]

Sure, and in this case as soon as the pay stops, the non-compete obligations stop as well.