They should be legal, but expensive. If it is so valuable to companies that their workers not leave to work for competitors, they should be required to pay 100% salary for the non-compete period.
> they should be required to pay 100% salary for the non-compete period.
I'd argue that falls way short of being useful and still screws over employees.
People switch jobs because they get better offers, and being forced to not only forego better offers but also get stuck with the same income while your offers get taken away from you hardly seems something that's in the worker's interests. In fact, it looks an awful lot like plain old unemployment benefits.
If you get a written offer from company B while working for company A under a non-compete, A must either:
- Allow you to leave unopposed
- Keep you in your current role by negotiating a more attractive offer
- Pay the value of offer B to put you on gardening leave for the non-compete period or 12 months, whichever is longer, and also compensate B for their recruitment costs
Would never happen, but it would be amusing to watch CEOs pitch a fit about it on Twitter.
There are a lot of requirements that need to be met to make non-competes enforceable in MD, eg must meet salary bar, geographic location and duration must be specified, etc.
But I don't think it requires paying the employee during the non-compete time.
I'd argue that falls way short of being useful and still screws over employees.
People switch jobs because they get better offers, and being forced to not only forego better offers but also get stuck with the same income while your offers get taken away from you hardly seems something that's in the worker's interests. In fact, it looks an awful lot like plain old unemployment benefits.