Yeah, pretty much. You wouldn’t want us to treat news broadcasters like children or the mentally incompetent and prohibit them from entering into enforceable contracts, would you?
It’s precisely because I know how suspicious courts are of non-competition clauses and liquidated damages that I object to the “you shouldn’t have signed it” nonsense. These contracts don’t look like ordinary employment contracts. They look like contracts of servitude.
Ordinary employees and professionals shouldn’t be subject to non-competition contracts at all, ever. That’s not what they’re for.
And your faith in Sinclair’s lawyers is misplaced. Companies try to overreach in contracts all the time and are slapped down.
HD - respectfully, I think you’re underplaying the easily recognizable fact that in relations between employers and individual employees, the employers will very often have significantly more leverage in negotiations and general employment policies. After all, if an employer lets a single employee go, it is very often just a small part of the overall organization that needs to be covered for because of that termination. Businesses rarely fall apart because a single person is fired.
From the employee side, losing a job can easily be a catastrophic event in one’s life, from the loss of income, to the loss of health insurance, to the greater difficulty of finding another job once you’ve been fired.
Saying that either side can walk away from the employment arrangement therefore power is equal is quite simply a grossly misleading statement. That does not mean that you have to advocate for collective bargaining or various other labor protections, of course – but let’s acknowledge reality and agree that employers hold more cards than individual employees.
Firing an employee often negatively effects not just the employee but also his/her family. Losing an employee usually does not have the same kind of effect on an employer, especially a large employer. It is in society’s best interests to lessen such easily visible negative externalities.
I already have acknowledged that there’s a power difference in many cases (see post #61), and I certainly never claimed anything like “therefore power is equal”. You’re attributing views to me that I do not hold - and then attacking as “a grossly misleading statement” something I have not said.