I have a small consulting company. I had a client hand me a non-compete. He listed my name and that I essentially couldn’t work for any IT entity in the state. I signed it.
I don’t do business as me, I do business as my company. And it was 100% unenforceable since he was trying to say that by doing a single job for his company would prevent me from doing business with his competitors. His lawyer even laughed about it when reaching out as he knew it was a sad attempt to force contractors to accept his contracts over other entities.
Even he didn’t know how they work and he was handing them out like candy.
Non-competes have been null and void in California for some time. Employees can also recover attorney fees if someone tries to enforce one. It’s one of the reasons startups can be started here without fear of persecution by a previous employer.
I protest voted one year because I hated the candidates. That was the year Trump got elected. I’m never doing that again. Lina’s well worth supporting in the next few elections, but the real options this year are already set. Everything else is equivalent to not voting at all.
I’m often torn when talking about how to vote in US elections because you guys have to balance ideology with the need to be pragmatic far more due to the First Past the Post (FPTP) voting system. The only way that Democrats get a serious signal that they need to move left is by voting for far-left candidates, even those who aren’t on the ballot, but that runs the risk of handing the election to the Republicans.
Y’all seriously need some Ranked Choice (RC) voting. I have never once voted for a major party number 1 in any election I’ve participated in, and that’s never caused my vote to be ‘wasted’ like it can be under FPTP. Mandatory voting would really help too - it would expose the fact that Republicans only make up around 30% of all people and they’d never be able to govern outside a coalition ever again.
I firmly believe that if the US got rid of the primary elections and implemented both RC and mandatory voting, we’d be nearing the end of Bernie Sanders’ second term right now.
STAR or ranked choice voting wouldn’t really fix the big issue. The issue is that we live in a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, not that we don’t have enough bourgeois parties able to compete.
It’s not that it runs the risk, it’s a guarantee. There’s no situation in which another more leftist party gaining a significant number of votes doesn’t mean handing the presidency over to the republican party. Fptp is a really bad system.
It’s always discouraging to me that when the topic of alternate voting methods comes up, RCV is always mentioned as the way to go. It seems to be the alternative voting method most people are familiar with.
RCV has it’s problems and there are demonstrably better voting systems such as you said STAR voting.
I’ve had a few of these. Honestly, they’re pretty hard to actually trigger. At least in mine, short of something along the lines of corporate espionage or insider trading, there’s not much in there that’s vague enough to hinder career prospects since, I assume, they’re legally not allowed to. It’s generally been, “You can’t work for another company on this very specific thing you never heard of before starting here and will probably never hear of again, for the next 24 months.”
Haven’t heard of them being misused for retention out in the wild, but I assume they must be enough to cause this.
My last company sued at least two former employees that I know about. The thing with non competes isn’t that the company makes money back by suing. It’s more worth it for them to file suit if the executive’s pride is hurt or if they want to send a message to other employees.
I have. A guy was an electronics sales account manager at a previous job. He came to work for us as an IT services sales manager. Two or three months in, the previous employer called us and said his noncompete covered everything related to technology (or maybe just a combination of sales and technology), so he left.
The last noncompete I signed, I wrote in the margins, in pen, that I was allowed to do anything I wanted so long as it didn’t directly harm the interests of the company I was leaving. They signed it.
Healthcare, specifically providers, are extremely hampered by these. Imagine working at a hospital in a big city and you must sign a noncompete that blocks you from working at any other hospital system within 50 miles. If you’re a specialist, it’s worse than that because you can’t exactly flex into another role easily.
At least in mine, short of something along the lines of corporate espionage or insider trading
Normally that would be covered by something like an NDA or Non-Solicitation, rather than a Non-comp - or even just federal law for something like insider trading.
It’s true though, Non-comps are usually unfair and unnecessary and overly restrictive.
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