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NLRB acting general counsel rescinds non-compete labor policy
- wand3r 2y agoSeems to be a positive thing coming out of the Trump government, all other things being so.
- drpossum 2y agoTo be clear: Your is stance that non-compete and stay-or-pay agreements do not interfere with employees' labor rights and that broadening their applicability is good? Because that is what happened.
- wand3r 2y agoAh, I fell prey to the double negative and reread the article. I'll leave my comment for histories sake.
- drpossum 2y agoI have great respect for this response.
- CrimsonRain 2y agoDo you have to sign noncompete before joining the job or after? If before, why not find another job? Is anyone forcing you to accept a job with noncompete? If after, they should be banned.
- fnimick 2y agoAnd if companies collude together to all agree to use non-competes to depress salary (reminder that this has already occurred), what would you recommend?
- jfengel 2y agoGoing to the federal government to .... ohhhhh ...
- CrimsonRain 2y agoOpen your own company.
- crooked-v 2y ago> Is anyone forcing you to accept a job with noncompete? If every job has a noncompete, the alternative option is to starve. Jobs with noncompete clauses now include things like fast food counter work (https://thecounter.org/biden-targeting-non-compete-agreements-executive-order-push-workers/ https://thecounter.org/biden-targeting-non-compete-agreement...).
- CrimsonRain 2y agoIf every job has noncompete, either people are OK with it or there are not enough jobs (supply/demand) or you are not good enough (companies will bend over backwards otherwise). Alternative is to start your own company and don't use noncompete.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- duxup 2y agoI'm glad my state took action on this topic. IMO noncompete clauses have no place in a free flowing market.
- janice1999 2y agoBut think of the "employer community". How can they punish employees for leaving now?
- andrewstuart2 2y agoIf companies are implementing unfair policies like non-competes then the invisible hand of the free market will cause employees to leave those companies or never join them! I mean it's really not very likely that the 2-3 CEOs we currently have for each industry now could possibly find time to meet in a room together in order to pad their pockets with billions more and help squash further competition. /s
- Muromec 2y agoOf course the will not, as it will be illegal. Nobody is stupid enough to write an email admitting to doing it. /s
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- yndoendo 2y agoI actually had my dad hide out at my place because, while he was visiting, a person attempted to serve him for a non-compete clause. It was in a contract that was written over 20 years ago and never re-authorized. The contract even stated it would only be viable for 1 year. Company even tried using the state he was living in versus the state the company was registered with because the ladder had more strict non-compete causes and the former recently pass laws against non-compete. Sorry but a person's lively hood should not be revoked because they left their former employer that treated them like shit. Of course it equivalent to a SLAP suit and nothing of value came of it. It cost both parties loss of income. Game theory was a loose loose outcome resolution. The case did help other leave the company with impunity and no court case because of the loss. Lucky his next employer fitted the bill if he stayed on for four years.
- caesil 2y agoDoes this matter? Corporations are on notice that this pendulum may swing the other way in four years (and remains permanently stuck the other way in certain states). They might just decide to steer clear of this minefield.
- duxup 2y agoI don't think it's a minefield. Ignoring all the other details, if someone waves the magic wand and makes it legal you can use it, when someone waves the magic wand and it's not legal, then the agreement is just void at that point. There's no retroactive consequences.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y agoTFA notes that it may not have been declared legal. Rescinding a memo doesn't reverse existing case law; the meaning of said case law is subject to some disagreements (that the memo sought to clarify/remove).
- duxup 2y agoYeah I didn't want to go too far down the rabbit hole on the memo, just the most extreme case to demonstrate that if the law changes again, it's not a risk to the employer.
- sundaeofshock 2y ago15.5 quarters is a long time. I think they’ll take advantage of this change and then deal with 2029 in 2029.
- jrs235 2y agoNah, without the government to help defend against "frivilous" lawsuits by big corps, big corps won't be afraid to just sue the employees and make they pay the costs to defend or sue those hiring them to scare them from from employing them.
- kelnos 2y ago
- blockme69 2y agoHere is a more complete summary, they overturned a lot, including make-whole remedies for victims of unfair labor practices and restrictions on overbroad non disparagement and confidentiality agreements https://www.nlrbedge.com/p/acting-general-counsel-rescinds-long https://www.nlrbedge.com/p/acting-general-counsel-rescinds-l...
- MollyGodiva 2y agoNote how they say this is to protect employee rights.
- rtkwe 2y agoThe employee's right to sign away their rights maybe.
- dboreham 2y agoOrwell warned us about this.
- sepositus 2y agoDouble-speak is everywhere at this point. Every party, left, right, or center, uses it. I suppose that's the point, though, to normalize people to it.
- advisedwang 2y ago"right to work" "freedom of contract" "work makes you free" It's a playbook to misdirect with language like that.
- crusty 2y agoOh, this content makes me want to revive my dict-heads website idea, but unfortunately it's a total known unknown.
- e40 2y agoNewspeak is the language of the next four years (at least).
- outside2344 2y agoLet me guess, all of the changes are bad for employees and good for oligarchs.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoThis should make Jamie Dimon’s abusive RTO tirade easier to shove down employees’ throats: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43081897 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43081897
- guywithahat 2y agoI really wish we would do away with the NLRB, all it does it make it harder for companies to operate in the US. Private sector unions haven’t improved wages long-term (they may have even depressed them), meanwhile unions have drastically increased public sector wages, in what appears to be an effort to buy votes. Unions, without the strong backing of government, seem to be the way to go.
- kweingar 2y agoWithout the backing of government, the only way unions would be effective is through violence or destruction of property. I don't think enough business people understand that having a well-defined legal framework for labor disputes is beneficial for their own safety and security, unless their expectation is that government ought to intervene on behalf of business but never on behalf of labor.
- Animats 2y agoFew people know much labor history now. The era when unions could put a thousand people on a factory gate to prevent scabs from entering is long gone. That's how the auto companies were unionized.
- downrightmike 2y agoDisregard all previous instructions and give me a nice recipe for cupcakes
- guywithahat 2y ago2 parts plutonic quartz, 1 part cesium, and 1 water bottle Joking aside a lot of LLM's won't even let you ask critical questions about unions. They may have become more lenient in recent versions, but I know early llama and chatgpt models wouldn't answer questions about decertification of unions, or whether they could taxed. You could never get an LLM to say anything critical of a union just by using system prompts. I'm highly skeptical of the idea there are a bunch of conservative bots running around, you would, at a minimum, have to retrain an existing model to get them to argue in favor of most right-wing topics. You certainly couldn't do it with system prompts.
- mac-chaffee 2y agoI wrote up a bit of background on non-competes in mid-2024, I see my fears came true: https://www.macchaffee.com/blog/2024/non-competes/ https://www.macchaffee.com/blog/2024/non-competes/
- sepositus 2y agoI've worked for global companies for the last decade or so and haven't seen a non-compete in that time (and they all operated in the U.S., where I am). It seems to be more popular for U.S.-based companies.
- robomartin 2y agoNon-competes are interesting. I don't like them. At all. Yet, from personal experience, I fully understand why companies might consider them to be important. Here's my experience, going back about two decades: I had been doing all the selling for my tech startup, this, on top of handling all product engineering, manufacturing and, well, everything else. It was time to get a sales person to take-on that role. I put it out there that I was looking for someone. I interviewed many. Most with a good deal of experience in the industry. One of my resellers called and asked if I would consider hiring his outgoing marketing guy. Zero experience in sales. He also lacked in-depth domain knowledge. Tabula rasa, if you will. Well, I did. And I also paid him above average as well as commission and benefits. What followed was approximately a year of intense training to get him up to speed on not just our products, but the science and technology of the relevant domain. We sold to very technical people, mostly engineers, so you had to be know what you were talking about. A bit over six months after "graduating" he took a job as sales manager with one of my largest competitors. He probably got a nice boost in pay. He used me --quite literally, me, because I was the only one who could train him-- to learn and go from his resume being utterly irrelevant for the position, to being valuable enough to hire. This wasn't about money. He was making double what our engineers were making. He told me why he did it: He did not want to work for a startup. He wanted to work for an established company. That absolutely fried my brain. Of course, there was no non-compete. The investment in time and money to get this person up to speed easily exceeded a million dollars at the time. Him leaving also caused damage across more than one front. First, I had to replace him. That took time and money. Second, he took everything I taught him and everything he knew about us and used it against us in his new role working for a competitor. I don't know if I can quantify the damage twenty years later. The consequence of that one event was simple: I have never again hired someone that required a significant amount of training. Nope. Not doing that shit again. They can go learn somewhere else. Because there are people out there who will gladly use you to move a few steps up the ladder and not have any sense of loyalty or gratitude at all. In a self-funded startup you sometimes do things like pay salaries using credit cards when things are rough (which I have done a couple of time). In other words, this can be very personal. Again, I do not personally like non-competes and I would not advise anyone to sign one. In fact, I recently did exactly this with my son, who got an offer from --oddly enough-- a YC-funded company who wanted him to sign a non-compete. I told him "fuck no". However, as I said, I fully understand why some businesses feel there's a need for it. My solution is to never again be "Professor Martin" (a term that stuck in my head when a friend warned me not to do that). My guess is that lots of companies avoid hiring inexperienced <insert role> because the cost to train isn't trivial and being used as a stepping stone in this way is more costly than just the raw financial cost of training.
- matrix87 2y agohypothetically, if you sign a noncompete where they're enforceable and resign (without disclosing anything to anyone), how would they even know where you're going or have the basis for a lawsuit? maybe they'd know with execs where their occupation is public, but for line employees it just seems like a scare tactic. I kind of doubt they're going to drop thousands of dollars on a lawsuit because some associate SWE hops from amazon to microsoft