30 ms·

Ontario bans non-competes and creates right to disconnect from work

575 points by smitop 5y ago

crooked-v 5y ago
The second part isn't really a "right to disconnect from work" as much as it is forcing employers to be explicit as to whether the job allows you to disconnect from work or not. That's still a step in the right direction, though.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
Reading the text, they didn’t actually create a right to disconnect from work. They only require employers to write down their policy and share it with employees: > The legislation offers no guidance as to what must be included in the policy, and simply provides that the policy must include "such information as may be prescribed." This was apparently intentional as noted in the legislative summary in an effort to offer employers flexibility to develop a policy appropriate to its operational needs. So unless I’m missing something, a company can write down “Employees must be available as needed” or something equally vague and they comply with the policy. In practice I would expect most employers to write a lot of vague wording about how employees aren’t required to be active online in their off hours, but they’ll leave the door open for emergency communications as needed. No sane company is going to write down a legally binding policy that nobody is going to contact anybody else at certain times. Imagine how easy it would be for a manager to break such a restriction by accidentally tagging an employee name in Slack at the wrong time of day, for example. The “right to disconnect” seems largely symbolic. On the other hand, banning non-competes is a big deal. They are effectively banned in my location (and several other states in the United States) and it’s great to not worry about it at all.
- GauntletWizard 5y ago
  I'm A-okay with just clarifying the policy. I carried a pager, and got paid well for it. I no longer do, hut absolutely would again for the right compensation.
  - eru 5y ago
    Yes, absolutely. People in software get paid well enough and have enough other options that freedom of contract is the best policy. Let people know upfront what they are getting into, and then let them make their own choice about whether it's worthwhile or not. There might be some argument about whether this kind of 'consenting adults' approach to labour regulation is the right or wrong approach for less well off people. (Many people seem to think that the poor are like kids and need to be protected from themselves by someone who knows better what's good for them..) But for people in the ever-booming field of software, that's a hard argument to make.
    - franga2000 5y ago
      > Many people seem to think that the poor are like kids and need to be protected from themselves by someone who knows better what's good for them That's not the reason. If you're poor, you are likely desperately looking for a job. This means that if you are offered one with shit working conditions, but that pays better than your current situation (which might be zero!), you HAVE TO take it. Most people have nearly zero bargaining power in their employment, which is why we need regulation especially for them. And yes, while in a highly-valued field like IT, we usually have enough bargaining power, regulation still helps us. If the baseline was "just don't beat your workers, everything else is legal", we'd have a lot more to negotiate first, before we even got to the things we negotiate these days like benefits, loose schedules, work from home, etc. And it's not like we can't fall on hard times either. Not everyone that is paid well is rich. They might be the main source of income for a large family or a have sick or old relatives to take care of. Or they might be at the start of their career without any savings. Bargaining power comes from the ability to quit, which comes from the ability to find a new job before your savings run out. No matter your industry, finding a job still takes time, so if you don't have enough savings to cover that time, you're in no better of a position than the poor person from the first paragraph.
      - eru 5y ago
        > And yes, while in a highly-valued field like IT, we usually have enough bargaining power, regulation still helps us. If the baseline was "just don't beat your workers, everything else is legal", we'd have a lot more to negotiate first, before we even got to the things we negotiate these days like benefits, loose schedules, work from home, etc. Nah. Compare eg restaurants. Food safety is strictly regulated in many countries, but taste ain't. Still, you can walk into most restaurants and get something reasonably palatable. No need to laboriously negotiate the taste. Similarly, in place and times when there was no minimum wage, people didn't typically negotiate their compensation from a baseline of zero. The baseline is what's prevalent in the market. (My adopted home of Singapore doesn't have a minimum wage today. Germany and Hong Kong only got theirs relatively recently. The pre-20th-century US didn't have one either, yet was the target of many migrants.) > And it's not like we can't fall on hard times either. Not everyone that is paid well is rich. They might be the main source of income for a large family or a have sick or old relatives to take care of. That might be an argument for a social safety net financed by tax payers. But not an argument in favour of adding extra burdens on those who would offer poor people a job. See https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/ https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...
- dghlsakjg 5y ago
  As an American working in Canada: Canada has a much stronger workers rights culture, and tends to have regulatory agencies that can produce results. (At the individual level, regulatory capture at the macro scale is just as prevalent, if not more so in the case of extractive industries). It wouldn’t surprise me if vague clauses don’t get upheld, or if requiring an employee to be connected also comes with the responsibility of compensation and expenses. When I worked for a company that required me to do on-call on holidays or weekends, I was given an extra vacation day in compensation even if I hadn’t actually done anything but triage. Work life in Canada seems generally much more balanced from an anecdotal perspective.
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    > When I worked for a company that required me to do on-call on holidays or weekends, I was given an extra vacation day in compensation even if I hadn’t actually done anything but triage. This also occurs in the US and is more due to tech labor market tightness.
    - dghlsakjg 5y ago
      This was true for employees across the organization (outside of the dev/it department), which was in the hospitality industry. It wasn’t done to retain hard to recruit tech employees, it was done because that is the expectation in many office environments in Canada.
      - kortilla 5y ago
        Expectations of employees is the market
        eru 5y ago
        It's part of the market. But it's not the only driving force. Employees can't magically 'expect' their total comp up or down. But expectations can drive how that comp is commonly split between eg salary and benefits like longer lunch hours.
hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
This is great news for Ontario. Prohibition against non-competes is probably the best thing a jurisdiction can do to incentivize new company formation and startups.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
mbloom1915 5y ago
non-compete rule does not apply to: "Executives, defined as "any person who holds the office of chief executive officer, president, chief administrative officer, chief operating officer, chief financial officer, chief information officer, chief legal officer, chief human resources officer or chief corporate development officer, or holds any other chief executive position." lol - cofounder is fine, as well as board member, head of sales... really whatever you want your title to be
- sfifs 5y ago
  As far as company rehulations are concerned, these titles have specific meanings, powers and liabilities. You can call the positions anything like Tesla does, but as far as regulators are concerned your company will still need to define some of these roles/accountabilities in specific people.
redis_mlc 5y ago
This is huge. Ontario is the "California" engine province of Canada, similar in geographic size and sophistication. It subsidizes the rest of Canada (the "have-nots"), but it can afford to do so. To give you an idea of how sophisticated Ontario is, most Hollywood comedians and a large percentage of writers are originally from the Toronto, ON area because of their writing and self-production abilities. Ontario universities have a direct brain-drain pipeline to SV, but this will help them return later in their careers.
- traject_ 5y ago
  > To give you an idea of how sophisticated Ontario is, most Hollywood comedians and a large percentage of writers are originally from the Toronto, ON area because of their writing and self-production abilities. Haha, that's just because Ontario has a large population with respect to Canada as a whole. Sophistication is not the right word to use as someone from Ontario.
- acchow 5y ago
  > Ontario is the "California" engine province of Canada Quick Wikipedia lookup of Canadian provinces by GDP per capita shows Ontario’s at 61k CAD, which precisely matches Canada’s overall Whereas Alberta’s is 31% higher.
  - jleyank 5y ago
    One has oil/gas and the other has money/tech. And I'm not sure per capita is the proper metric if you're looking at funding a country rather than comparing them.
    - gentleman11 5y ago
      Oil and gas in Alberta is hurting and most of the oil and gas workers I know have left the industry or become unemployed
    - gnabgib 5y ago
      Have you played Mass Effect, used Java or OpenBSD? One has natural resources and money and tech. Different parts of Canada bring different things to the table.
digianarchist 5y ago
This is really a non-story going into an election year. I have never heard of a non-compete being enforced here and the right to disconnect is a guideline with absolutely no teeth.
- belval 5y ago
  I agree that non-competes being enforced are uncommon. I've never even heard of it happening in Canada. That being said, my contract with AWS stipulates that I can't work for their competitors, it's insanely wide so I don't see how it could realistically be enforced, but I still signed it which means that technically I can't work for Azure/GCP. I would much rather see the practice outlawed entirely so as to not have to worry about it.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
    They get enforced all the time, with sales, marketing, and executives. I think that lower-on-the-totem-pole folks are unlikely to suffer, but HR departments love to have as much ammo as possible.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    Is it just an American boilerplate type thing? Americans just think they should have non-competes? As I work for an American parent company and my non-compete covers basically any other security or enterprise company. No IBM or EY or SAP for me. Ironically the subsidiary I work for is included on the list and the list includes no actual direct competitors. So walking away to our competitor and building them the exact same thing is interestingly legally fine.
    - kortilla 5y ago
      > Is it just an American boilerplate type thing? Americans just think they should have non-competes? No, they aren’t even legal in California so it’s just some employers and in some states. The financial ones in NY are actually pretty reasonable because employers will pay you during the time after you leave when you aren’t allowed to go to a competitor. Not sure if that’s legally require there or just the market expectation.
Waterluvian 5y ago
Non-competes weren’t really enforceable before. I’ve been there with an infantile CEO and talked with lawyers about it. Perhaps there’s some value in making it explicit, yet again. But I think this is one of those frustrating “another law for something we already have a law for.”
- gnabgib 5y ago
  They weren't, but companies still included terms in employee's contract.. and "not really enforceable" still requires a (legal) fight.. this is better, no?
  - Waterluvian 5y ago
    Companies will still include them. Just like “no pets” or anything else that’s very explicitly banned in the landlord tenant act.
    - gnabgib 5y ago
      In Ontario? Are you sure? [0] [1] [2] [0]: https://devrylaw.ca/renting-in-ontario-what-every-pet-owner-needs-to-know/ https://devrylaw.ca/renting-in-ontario-what-every-pet-owner-... [1}: https://animaljustice.ca/blog/renting-with-pets-a-guide-to-ontario-rental-law https://animaljustice.ca/blog/renting-with-pets-a-guide-to-o... [2]: https://www.toronto.ca/community-people/housing-shelter/rental-housing-tenant-information/rights-responsibilities-for-landlords-tenants/ https://www.toronto.ca/community-people/housing-shelter/rent...
      - MattGaiser 5y ago
        They can not rent to you for having pets, but if you end up having them, they cannot do anything.
- jt2190 5y ago
  > Non-competes weren’t really enforceable before. This depends completely on the jurisdiction and the circumstances. Non-competes in California and Texas are largely unenforceable (but not completely), whereas non-competes in New York and Massachusetts are enforceable. Edit: Here’s a state-by-state roundup: https://faircompetitionlaw.com/changing-landscape-of-trade-secrets-laws-and-noncompete-laws/ https://faircompetitionlaw.com/changing-landscape-of-trade-s...
lincolnq 5y ago
Employees not succeeding at disconnecting from work is often unintentional, and caused by subtle, pernicious effects of middle managers simply existing and following basic incentives (such as "my boss just sent me an email after dinner, guess I should act/forward it along"). Forcing companies to write down their policy on this seems like a pretty good idea, because it forces HR to actually decide how they want their employees to be treated, and enables middle managers to be held accountable for their actions along this axis.
- mavelikara 5y ago
  > "my boss just sent me an email after dinner, guess I should act/forward it along" I can't understand why the person sending the email after dinner is off the hook, but the person forwarding it along is solely to be blamed in your eyes.
  - jessecurry 5y ago
    Most C-level folks that I’ve worked with in the past decade have told me that they send messages when they have time, which is often off hours, but they don’t expect a reply until business hours. I’ve heard very few middle managers say the same thing, so a late night message may be perceived differently. But that’s just my personal experience, obviously very situational.
    - LeapingLennie 5y ago
      Yes, I've also had managers that start their day at some ungodly hour in the morning and so it wouldn't be unusual to receive emails from them at 5am. There was never any expectation to respond to emails straight away and the same should apply to emails sent in the evening.
      - SAI_Peregrinus 5y ago
        One nice feature of Slack is that you can schedule messages to send when the recipient's working hours start. Let the automation take care of keeping messages to working hours.
ipaddr 5y ago
Does this change allow employers to work part time for another company if the company forbids it?
rubyist5eva 5y ago
There's no "right to disconnect", it just makes companies come up with a formal policy. That policy can be: you can't. Non-competes were never enforceable. This is just BS toothless legislation from an unpopular corporatist government going into an election year pretending to be pro-worker.
- eru 5y ago
  Slightly off-topic: corporatist probably doesn't mean what you think it means. Probably just the opposite, actually. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism
  - rubyist5eva 5y ago
    Thank you for the clarification, I suppose what I really might is crony capitalist.
dukeofdoom 5y ago
More people will be working from home. So more rules are needed around setting reasonable hours between personal time and work time. The vaccinated have now matched the case count and hospitalization number of the unvaccinated. So come January, probably even more people will be working from home, because Ontario seems to be headed for another lockdown.
cpaika 5y ago
ontario - ngmi
vmception 5y ago
Protip: I read contracts and ignore onerous clauses if I know the state doesn’t support those clauses.
- eru 5y ago
  Be careful. There's multiple aspects to a contract. At the most adversarial, a contract is what you use as the basis for litigation, if it comes to a legal fight. But a well written contract is meant to avoid costly litigation, by making clear what both parties expect from each other. In practice, contracts are often boiler plate and lots of provisions do not apply, but would still be legally enforceable. While other expectations apply, but are not in the contract or are not enforceable. To give a silly example: many of my employment contracts specified some pro-forma working hours like 8am to 5pm. That was never enforced. But: if I had annoyed my employer in a way that the legally binding parts of the contract did not specify (eg by breaking an onerous clause that wasn't actually legally binding), they could have used those other clauses to annoy me. Or just fired me for officially unrelated reasons, or no official reason at all.
  - vmception 5y ago
    in the case of a non-compete, it doesn't matter because you are already not working for them and also not bound to not-compete yes, it is discretionary, know your leverage and be able to afford it.
    - eru 5y ago
      You have a point with a non-compete, but it's a matter of degree: there are certain obligations that persist after your employment, and some of them are legally binding, even if a non-compete ain't in your jurisdiction.
- llampx 5y ago
  Just two posts above is an example of someone who got let go from their new job when they found that he signed a non-compete at his previous job. Easy enough to bounce back from in the right labor market, not so easy in others.
fartcannon 5y ago
This doesn't ban non-solicitation which is often used to sabre rattle engineering firms into not hiring potential candidates and thus surpresses wages.
- Spivak 5y ago
  I’ve never seen this actually applied to or even talked about with engineers because it’s absurd. What software engineer is directly selling to customers? Is there somewhere that has had them enforced?
  - eru 5y ago
    I think the comment you mentioned might talk about non-solicitation in the sense that the former employee of company A who's now working for company B can not solicit the remaining employees of A to work for B? Funny enough, I helped plenty of people from past employers to find new jobs; but never with my current employer, but typically with some other past employer.
  - fartcannon 5y ago
    I was talking about all the consulting engineering firms full of civil, mechanical, electrical, transportation, etc, engineers. Among these jokers, it's extremely common practice. As a side note, in Ontario 'engineer' is a protected title and most (but not all) programming jobs wouldn't qualify. But since this is a US website about programming/business, you're probably not going to talk to a lot of Ontarians about programming or engineering, so this is probably useless information for you. But hey, there you go. Trivia night.
Proven 5y ago
iamtedd 5y ago
Why the hell does this site need to know my location?
tombert 5y ago
Oh man, I hope something like this hits New York soon. One of my biggest frustrations when working at Apple was how awful and draconian their non-compete was. California law protects Californians a bit in this regard, but I was working out of New York, and as a result those protections didn’t apply to me.
happy-go-lucky 5y ago
At a previous employer, as soon as I finished a task, my manager would go on assigning me cumulatively more work than what I was supposed to do. Not surprisingly, they could easily sense my reluctance to take any more of it, so they would try to sweet-talk me into doing it, say, "You always do a good job!" and the like. Most of the time I didn't know how to respond to such wily tactics, which I would describe as quite insincere and exploitative.
- happy-go-lucky 5y ago
  A lesson learned the hard way: Being sincerely passionate about something can sometimes backfire on you.
TeeMassive 5y ago
> prohibition against non-compete agreements with employees I've dealt with this recently, although it was in Québec where civil law applies so I don't know if it's the same. Here the case-law limits non-compete agreements to about ~1 year (most likely 6 months), to a specific relevant geographical area (think a county) and to a specific industry and if any of those clauses are not respected than the whole non-compete agreement is invalid. In my case they made the agreement to "companies offering engineering services", which was clearly abusive and thus I could get my new job after lawyers talked. I understand why they want to make it illegal, it has the potential to screw over many people and be very unfair. But there's a perverse effect of not having those is that establishing trust to climb the ladder will much more difficult since the trust barrier is set higher since nothing will stop someone from working to a direct competitor. This has been a real huge concern in places I used to work and I know from confidences that was made to me that people were constructively fired for not being trusted enough. IMO they should just have made it more restricted. IMO
redwood 5y ago
Non-competes are holding back NYC tech
maeln 5y ago
PSA: In a lot of country, non-competes agreement are illegal, at least in the form they usually take. In many jurisdiction, non-compete will only apply when specific condition are met. For example, in France[0], all non-compete have to have : - a "reasonable" time limit - a specific geographic region (i.e: only in France, U.E, etc...) -> this is very often omitted, and "the whole world" is not valid. - The non-competition has to be for a specific activity. This is often not understood and instead you find something like "not work for our competitor" or "not work for a company in this field". This is not specific enough and will be thrown out in court. - There has to be a financial compensation. Despite this, almost all the company that I worked for in France had non-applicable non-competes agreement in their contract. None of them offered a financial compensation and none had a specific region. As far as I know, this is not a France-only thing, and non-competes creeps in almost any employment contract in the world, especially in the tech field. Learn your rights. [0] https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F1910 https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F1910
- dataflow 5y ago
  What constitutes financial compensation? Can they just claim it's included in the salary? Edit: Cool! Thanks all.
  - sunderw 5y ago
    It has to be a financial compensation during the period covered by the non-compete. I think it also has to match your salary (otherwise it would be easy to exploit), but I'm not 100% sure.
  - jcelerier 5y ago
    No, it has to be paid after the work contract ends, either in one go or monthly. From what I could read the amount must be "reasonable": between 1/3 and 2/3 of the salary depending on how wide the non-compete is (https://www.village-justice.com/articles/montant-contrepartie-financiere,20763.html https://www.village-justice.com/articles/montant-contreparti...)
  - maeln 5y ago
alkonaut 5y ago
I work for an American parent company in Europe and I believe we have some blanket non-Compete clause in our contracts. I have no idea whether anyone actually thinks it’s enforcible. I haven’t heard of an employer suing an ex-employee, nor have I heard of an employer rejecting a candidate based on a non compete. So I’m happy to go work for a competitor and reimplement exactly what I’ve just done at my current job. If they really want me to not work for a competitor I’d be willing to discuss it but it would cost upwards of what I’m making as an employee.
JGM_io 5y ago
I'm Belgium non-competes for employees only count from a certain wage. 36k bruto
lxxxvi 5y ago
Slovenia reporting - non-competes exist but the company has to be paying you at least 1/3 of your average salary of the last 3 months with the company each month for the entire duration (max 2 years) to not compete.

575 points by smitop 5y ago

The second part isn't really a "right to disconnect from work" as much as it is forcing employers to be explicit as to whether the job allows you to disconnect from work or not. That's still a step in the right direction, though.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

Reading the text, they didn’t actually create a right to disconnect from work. They only require employers to write down their policy and share it with employees: > The legislation offers no guidance as to what must be included in the policy, and simply provides that the policy must include "such information as may be prescribed." This was apparently intentional as noted in the legislative summary in an effort to offer employers flexibility to develop a policy appropriate to its operational needs. So unless I’m missing something, a company can write down “Employees must be available as needed” or something equally vague and they comply with the policy. In practice I would expect most employers to write a lot of vague wording about how employees aren’t required to be active online in their off hours, but they’ll leave the door open for emergency communications as needed. No sane company is going to write down a legally binding policy that nobody is going to contact anybody else at certain times. Imagine how easy it would be for a manager to break such a restriction by accidentally tagging an employee name in Slack at the wrong time of day, for example. The “right to disconnect” seems largely symbolic. On the other hand, banning non-competes is a big deal. They are effectively banned in my location (and several other states in the United States) and it’s great to not worry about it at all.

GauntletWizard 5y ago
I'm A-okay with just clarifying the policy. I carried a pager, and got paid well for it. I no longer do, hut absolutely would again for the right compensation.
- eru 5y ago
  Yes, absolutely. People in software get paid well enough and have enough other options that freedom of contract is the best policy. Let people know upfront what they are getting into, and then let them make their own choice about whether it's worthwhile or not. There might be some argument about whether this kind of 'consenting adults' approach to labour regulation is the right or wrong approach for less well off people. (Many people seem to think that the poor are like kids and need to be protected from themselves by someone who knows better what's good for them..) But for people in the ever-booming field of software, that's a hard argument to make.
  - franga2000 5y ago
    > Many people seem to think that the poor are like kids and need to be protected from themselves by someone who knows better what's good for them That's not the reason. If you're poor, you are likely desperately looking for a job. This means that if you are offered one with shit working conditions, but that pays better than your current situation (which might be zero!), you HAVE TO take it. Most people have nearly zero bargaining power in their employment, which is why we need regulation especially for them. And yes, while in a highly-valued field like IT, we usually have enough bargaining power, regulation still helps us. If the baseline was "just don't beat your workers, everything else is legal", we'd have a lot more to negotiate first, before we even got to the things we negotiate these days like benefits, loose schedules, work from home, etc. And it's not like we can't fall on hard times either. Not everyone that is paid well is rich. They might be the main source of income for a large family or a have sick or old relatives to take care of. Or they might be at the start of their career without any savings. Bargaining power comes from the ability to quit, which comes from the ability to find a new job before your savings run out. No matter your industry, finding a job still takes time, so if you don't have enough savings to cover that time, you're in no better of a position than the poor person from the first paragraph.
    - eru 5y ago
      > And yes, while in a highly-valued field like IT, we usually have enough bargaining power, regulation still helps us. If the baseline was "just don't beat your workers, everything else is legal", we'd have a lot more to negotiate first, before we even got to the things we negotiate these days like benefits, loose schedules, work from home, etc. Nah. Compare eg restaurants. Food safety is strictly regulated in many countries, but taste ain't. Still, you can walk into most restaurants and get something reasonably palatable. No need to laboriously negotiate the taste. Similarly, in place and times when there was no minimum wage, people didn't typically negotiate their compensation from a baseline of zero. The baseline is what's prevalent in the market. (My adopted home of Singapore doesn't have a minimum wage today. Germany and Hong Kong only got theirs relatively recently. The pre-20th-century US didn't have one either, yet was the target of many migrants.) > And it's not like we can't fall on hard times either. Not everyone that is paid well is rich. They might be the main source of income for a large family or a have sick or old relatives to take care of. That might be an argument for a social safety net financed by tax payers. But not an argument in favour of adding extra burdens on those who would offer poor people a job. See https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/ https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...
dghlsakjg 5y ago
As an American working in Canada: Canada has a much stronger workers rights culture, and tends to have regulatory agencies that can produce results. (At the individual level, regulatory capture at the macro scale is just as prevalent, if not more so in the case of extractive industries). It wouldn’t surprise me if vague clauses don’t get upheld, or if requiring an employee to be connected also comes with the responsibility of compensation and expenses. When I worked for a company that required me to do on-call on holidays or weekends, I was given an extra vacation day in compensation even if I hadn’t actually done anything but triage. Work life in Canada seems generally much more balanced from an anecdotal perspective.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  > When I worked for a company that required me to do on-call on holidays or weekends, I was given an extra vacation day in compensation even if I hadn’t actually done anything but triage. This also occurs in the US and is more due to tech labor market tightness.
  - dghlsakjg 5y ago
    This was true for employees across the organization (outside of the dev/it department), which was in the hospitality industry. It wasn’t done to retain hard to recruit tech employees, it was done because that is the expectation in many office environments in Canada.
    - kortilla 5y ago
      Expectations of employees is the market
      - eru 5y ago
        It's part of the market. But it's not the only driving force. Employees can't magically 'expect' their total comp up or down. But expectations can drive how that comp is commonly split between eg salary and benefits like longer lunch hours.

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago

This is great news for Ontario. Prohibition against non-competes is probably the best thing a jurisdiction can do to incentivize new company formation and startups.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

mbloom1915 5y ago

non-compete rule does not apply to: "Executives, defined as "any person who holds the office of chief executive officer, president, chief administrative officer, chief operating officer, chief financial officer, chief information officer, chief legal officer, chief human resources officer or chief corporate development officer, or holds any other chief executive position." lol - cofounder is fine, as well as board member, head of sales... really whatever you want your title to be

sfifs 5y ago
As far as company rehulations are concerned, these titles have specific meanings, powers and liabilities. You can call the positions anything like Tesla does, but as far as regulators are concerned your company will still need to define some of these roles/accountabilities in specific people.

redis_mlc 5y ago

This is huge. Ontario is the "California" engine province of Canada, similar in geographic size and sophistication. It subsidizes the rest of Canada (the "have-nots"), but it can afford to do so. To give you an idea of how sophisticated Ontario is, most Hollywood comedians and a large percentage of writers are originally from the Toronto, ON area because of their writing and self-production abilities. Ontario universities have a direct brain-drain pipeline to SV, but this will help them return later in their careers.

traject_ 5y ago
> To give you an idea of how sophisticated Ontario is, most Hollywood comedians and a large percentage of writers are originally from the Toronto, ON area because of their writing and self-production abilities. Haha, that's just because Ontario has a large population with respect to Canada as a whole. Sophistication is not the right word to use as someone from Ontario.
acchow 5y ago
> Ontario is the "California" engine province of Canada Quick Wikipedia lookup of Canadian provinces by GDP per capita shows Ontario’s at 61k CAD, which precisely matches Canada’s overall Whereas Alberta’s is 31% higher.
- jleyank 5y ago
  One has oil/gas and the other has money/tech. And I'm not sure per capita is the proper metric if you're looking at funding a country rather than comparing them.
  - gentleman11 5y ago
    Oil and gas in Alberta is hurting and most of the oil and gas workers I know have left the industry or become unemployed
  - gnabgib 5y ago
    Have you played Mass Effect, used Java or OpenBSD? One has natural resources and money and tech. Different parts of Canada bring different things to the table.

digianarchist 5y ago

This is really a non-story going into an election year. I have never heard of a non-compete being enforced here and the right to disconnect is a guideline with absolutely no teeth.

belval 5y ago
I agree that non-competes being enforced are uncommon. I've never even heard of it happening in Canada. That being said, my contract with AWS stipulates that I can't work for their competitors, it's insanely wide so I don't see how it could realistically be enforced, but I still signed it which means that technically I can't work for Azure/GCP. I would much rather see the practice outlawed entirely so as to not have to worry about it.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  They get enforced all the time, with sales, marketing, and executives. I think that lower-on-the-totem-pole folks are unlikely to suffer, but HR departments love to have as much ammo as possible.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Is it just an American boilerplate type thing? Americans just think they should have non-competes? As I work for an American parent company and my non-compete covers basically any other security or enterprise company. No IBM or EY or SAP for me. Ironically the subsidiary I work for is included on the list and the list includes no actual direct competitors. So walking away to our competitor and building them the exact same thing is interestingly legally fine.
  - kortilla 5y ago
    > Is it just an American boilerplate type thing? Americans just think they should have non-competes? No, they aren’t even legal in California so it’s just some employers and in some states. The financial ones in NY are actually pretty reasonable because employers will pay you during the time after you leave when you aren’t allowed to go to a competitor. Not sure if that’s legally require there or just the market expectation.

Waterluvian 5y ago

Non-competes weren’t really enforceable before. I’ve been there with an infantile CEO and talked with lawyers about it. Perhaps there’s some value in making it explicit, yet again. But I think this is one of those frustrating “another law for something we already have a law for.”

gnabgib 5y ago
They weren't, but companies still included terms in employee's contract.. and "not really enforceable" still requires a (legal) fight.. this is better, no?
- Waterluvian 5y ago
  Companies will still include them. Just like “no pets” or anything else that’s very explicitly banned in the landlord tenant act.
  - gnabgib 5y ago
    In Ontario? Are you sure? [0] [1] [2] [0]: https://devrylaw.ca/renting-in-ontario-what-every-pet-owner-needs-to-know/ https://devrylaw.ca/renting-in-ontario-what-every-pet-owner-... [1}: https://animaljustice.ca/blog/renting-with-pets-a-guide-to-ontario-rental-law https://animaljustice.ca/blog/renting-with-pets-a-guide-to-o... [2]: https://www.toronto.ca/community-people/housing-shelter/rental-housing-tenant-information/rights-responsibilities-for-landlords-tenants/ https://www.toronto.ca/community-people/housing-shelter/rent...
    - MattGaiser 5y ago
      They can not rent to you for having pets, but if you end up having them, they cannot do anything.
jt2190 5y ago
> Non-competes weren’t really enforceable before. This depends completely on the jurisdiction and the circumstances. Non-competes in California and Texas are largely unenforceable (but not completely), whereas non-competes in New York and Massachusetts are enforceable. Edit: Here’s a state-by-state roundup: https://faircompetitionlaw.com/changing-landscape-of-trade-secrets-laws-and-noncompete-laws/ https://faircompetitionlaw.com/changing-landscape-of-trade-s...

lincolnq 5y ago

Employees not succeeding at disconnecting from work is often unintentional, and caused by subtle, pernicious effects of middle managers simply existing and following basic incentives (such as "my boss just sent me an email after dinner, guess I should act/forward it along"). Forcing companies to write down their policy on this seems like a pretty good idea, because it forces HR to actually decide how they want their employees to be treated, and enables middle managers to be held accountable for their actions along this axis.

mavelikara 5y ago
> "my boss just sent me an email after dinner, guess I should act/forward it along" I can't understand why the person sending the email after dinner is off the hook, but the person forwarding it along is solely to be blamed in your eyes.
- jessecurry 5y ago
  Most C-level folks that I’ve worked with in the past decade have told me that they send messages when they have time, which is often off hours, but they don’t expect a reply until business hours. I’ve heard very few middle managers say the same thing, so a late night message may be perceived differently. But that’s just my personal experience, obviously very situational.
  - LeapingLennie 5y ago
    Yes, I've also had managers that start their day at some ungodly hour in the morning and so it wouldn't be unusual to receive emails from them at 5am. There was never any expectation to respond to emails straight away and the same should apply to emails sent in the evening.
    - SAI_Peregrinus 5y ago
      One nice feature of Slack is that you can schedule messages to send when the recipient's working hours start. Let the automation take care of keeping messages to working hours.

ipaddr 5y ago

Does this change allow employers to work part time for another company if the company forbids it?

rubyist5eva 5y ago

There's no "right to disconnect", it just makes companies come up with a formal policy. That policy can be: you can't. Non-competes were never enforceable. This is just BS toothless legislation from an unpopular corporatist government going into an election year pretending to be pro-worker.

eru 5y ago
Slightly off-topic: corporatist probably doesn't mean what you think it means. Probably just the opposite, actually. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism
- rubyist5eva 5y ago
  Thank you for the clarification, I suppose what I really might is crony capitalist.

dukeofdoom 5y ago

More people will be working from home. So more rules are needed around setting reasonable hours between personal time and work time. The vaccinated have now matched the case count and hospitalization number of the unvaccinated. So come January, probably even more people will be working from home, because Ontario seems to be headed for another lockdown.

cpaika 5y ago

ontario - ngmi

vmception 5y ago

Protip: I read contracts and ignore onerous clauses if I know the state doesn’t support those clauses.

eru 5y ago
Be careful. There's multiple aspects to a contract. At the most adversarial, a contract is what you use as the basis for litigation, if it comes to a legal fight. But a well written contract is meant to avoid costly litigation, by making clear what both parties expect from each other. In practice, contracts are often boiler plate and lots of provisions do not apply, but would still be legally enforceable. While other expectations apply, but are not in the contract or are not enforceable. To give a silly example: many of my employment contracts specified some pro-forma working hours like 8am to 5pm. That was never enforced. But: if I had annoyed my employer in a way that the legally binding parts of the contract did not specify (eg by breaking an onerous clause that wasn't actually legally binding), they could have used those other clauses to annoy me. Or just fired me for officially unrelated reasons, or no official reason at all.
- vmception 5y ago
  in the case of a non-compete, it doesn't matter because you are already not working for them and also not bound to not-compete yes, it is discretionary, know your leverage and be able to afford it.
  - eru 5y ago
    You have a point with a non-compete, but it's a matter of degree: there are certain obligations that persist after your employment, and some of them are legally binding, even if a non-compete ain't in your jurisdiction.
llampx 5y ago
Just two posts above is an example of someone who got let go from their new job when they found that he signed a non-compete at his previous job. Easy enough to bounce back from in the right labor market, not so easy in others.

fartcannon 5y ago

This doesn't ban non-solicitation which is often used to sabre rattle engineering firms into not hiring potential candidates and thus surpresses wages.

Spivak 5y ago
I’ve never seen this actually applied to or even talked about with engineers because it’s absurd. What software engineer is directly selling to customers? Is there somewhere that has had them enforced?
- eru 5y ago
  I think the comment you mentioned might talk about non-solicitation in the sense that the former employee of company A who's now working for company B can not solicit the remaining employees of A to work for B? Funny enough, I helped plenty of people from past employers to find new jobs; but never with my current employer, but typically with some other past employer.
- fartcannon 5y ago
  I was talking about all the consulting engineering firms full of civil, mechanical, electrical, transportation, etc, engineers. Among these jokers, it's extremely common practice. As a side note, in Ontario 'engineer' is a protected title and most (but not all) programming jobs wouldn't qualify. But since this is a US website about programming/business, you're probably not going to talk to a lot of Ontarians about programming or engineering, so this is probably useless information for you. But hey, there you go. Trivia night.

Proven 5y ago

iamtedd 5y ago

Why the hell does this site need to know my location?

tombert 5y ago

Oh man, I hope something like this hits New York soon. One of my biggest frustrations when working at Apple was how awful and draconian their non-compete was. California law protects Californians a bit in this regard, but I was working out of New York, and as a result those protections didn’t apply to me.

happy-go-lucky 5y ago

At a previous employer, as soon as I finished a task, my manager would go on assigning me cumulatively more work than what I was supposed to do. Not surprisingly, they could easily sense my reluctance to take any more of it, so they would try to sweet-talk me into doing it, say, "You always do a good job!" and the like. Most of the time I didn't know how to respond to such wily tactics, which I would describe as quite insincere and exploitative.

happy-go-lucky 5y ago
A lesson learned the hard way: Being sincerely passionate about something can sometimes backfire on you.

TeeMassive 5y ago

> prohibition against non-compete agreements with employees I've dealt with this recently, although it was in Québec where civil law applies so I don't know if it's the same. Here the case-law limits non-compete agreements to about ~1 year (most likely 6 months), to a specific relevant geographical area (think a county) and to a specific industry and if any of those clauses are not respected than the whole non-compete agreement is invalid. In my case they made the agreement to "companies offering engineering services", which was clearly abusive and thus I could get my new job after lawyers talked. I understand why they want to make it illegal, it has the potential to screw over many people and be very unfair. But there's a perverse effect of not having those is that establishing trust to climb the ladder will much more difficult since the trust barrier is set higher since nothing will stop someone from working to a direct competitor. This has been a real huge concern in places I used to work and I know from confidences that was made to me that people were constructively fired for not being trusted enough. IMO they should just have made it more restricted. IMO

redwood 5y ago

Non-competes are holding back NYC tech

maeln 5y ago

PSA: In a lot of country, non-competes agreement are illegal, at least in the form they usually take. In many jurisdiction, non-compete will only apply when specific condition are met. For example, in France[0], all non-compete have to have : - a "reasonable" time limit - a specific geographic region (i.e: only in France, U.E, etc...) -> this is very often omitted, and "the whole world" is not valid. - The non-competition has to be for a specific activity. This is often not understood and instead you find something like "not work for our competitor" or "not work for a company in this field". This is not specific enough and will be thrown out in court. - There has to be a financial compensation. Despite this, almost all the company that I worked for in France had non-applicable non-competes agreement in their contract. None of them offered a financial compensation and none had a specific region. As far as I know, this is not a France-only thing, and non-competes creeps in almost any employment contract in the world, especially in the tech field. Learn your rights. [0] https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F1910 https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F1910

dataflow 5y ago
What constitutes financial compensation? Can they just claim it's included in the salary? Edit: Cool! Thanks all.
- sunderw 5y ago
  It has to be a financial compensation during the period covered by the non-compete. I think it also has to match your salary (otherwise it would be easy to exploit), but I'm not 100% sure.
- jcelerier 5y ago
  No, it has to be paid after the work contract ends, either in one go or monthly. From what I could read the amount must be "reasonable": between 1/3 and 2/3 of the salary depending on how wide the non-compete is (https://www.village-justice.com/articles/montant-contrepartie-financiere,20763.html https://www.village-justice.com/articles/montant-contreparti...)
- maeln 5y ago

alkonaut 5y ago

I work for an American parent company in Europe and I believe we have some blanket non-Compete clause in our contracts. I have no idea whether anyone actually thinks it’s enforcible. I haven’t heard of an employer suing an ex-employee, nor have I heard of an employer rejecting a candidate based on a non compete. So I’m happy to go work for a competitor and reimplement exactly what I’ve just done at my current job. If they really want me to not work for a competitor I’d be willing to discuss it but it would cost upwards of what I’m making as an employee.

JGM_io 5y ago

I'm Belgium non-competes for employees only count from a certain wage. 36k bruto

lxxxvi 5y ago

Slovenia reporting - non-competes exist but the company has to be paying you at least 1/3 of your average salary of the last 3 months with the company each month for the entire duration (max 2 years) to not compete.