[olliej]

Oh I agree entirely, the compensation should match your opportunity in industry. Specifically if you can get an offer for total compensation X and your current employer chooses to say you can't work at that other company, your current employer gets to match X plus say a 20-30% premium to compensate for lost year of experience, lost year of promotions, etc and to try and say "do you really want to inflict this noncompete on people?". Note that you would not be employed by your current/former employer, they are paying you to not work for a competitor but if they require you to do work for them then they're just reseting the non-compete period.

My goal in limiting NCAs would be for employers: "you cannot use non competes to artificially lower employee compensation, as your total cost will be much very expensive"; and for individuals: "if you are subject to an NCA you will actually be compensated for that period".

It would also mean you can do industry standard practice of changing jobs to increase compensation even while subject to an NCA as they would be required to pay you more than the "competitor" if you get an offer and they want to prevent you taking it. Again the goal is to prevent the use of NCAs for wage suppression - the company requiring the NCA would have to be really dedicated to their belief the NCA is needed.