You mean besides the fact that their inventory is all poorly made plastic shit made in countries that have no child or involuntary labor protections?
Such broad non-compete agreements that prohibit an employee from working in a particular industry would be virtually unenforcible anywhere, even in states with unfavorable labor laws. You can’t simply induce employees to sign away a basic right to employment across an entire industry (or associated industries) with no consideration or compensatory provisions. Noncompetes, even where valid, have to be specific to a role or position with potential competitors, and otherwise fairly narrow in focus, and even then in order to be practically enforcible the ‘injured party’ generally has to show some real harm such as loss of competitive advantage or transfer of proprietary information in order to actually obtain anything but a token judgment. What NCAs really do is make an employee less appealing to competitors (by providing some avenue, however infeasible, to bring suit) and remind the employee that they are restricted in how and when they can seek employment.
I don’t know who dreams this shit up but it certainly doesn’t go past any critical legal review, so I have to assume it is some asshole in C-suite who thinks that if they give the command it will be made so. I actually was given the ‘choice’ to sign an agreement that I would not work in any engineering position anywhere for the next five years in exchange for being able to keep my job with no guarantees or additional incentives with a company that was already swirling the drain. I did what Jack Burton always does; I looked that fucker straight in the eye and said, “Give me eveyrthing you got. I can take it!” (I didn’t, actually, but I did return the agreement without signiture and with a note saying, “I decline your invitation to involuntary servitute,” which may explain why I was let go a couple of months later, albeit with a better severence package than the later flights of RIFs got.)
I had a point when I started this but it has since stopped showing up like a programmer working on a 2K bug at some nameless software company.
Stranger
