
States should ban contracts barring employees from seeking higher pay at a rival - doener
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-07-25/states-should-ban-contracts-barring-workers-from-joining-rivals
======
netcan
Non compete contracts and non poaching agreements are insidious and _should_
be illegal. Ilegal, not just unenforceable.

But, among the many imbalances between employees and employers... few are as
easy to fix. A major imbalance is information.

One radical idea is salary transparency. It would be an emotionally difficult
transition, but I think the effect on salaries would be transformational.

Information is, a big part of what markets _are_. If you are negotiating
salary armed with the same information your counterpart has, you are in a much
better situation. At the very least, it would help those people who are the
worst at negotiating and have an employer that will take advantage of this.

Eliminate anti competition agreements, in a year you may find a measurable
marginal effect. Publish all salaries and the effects will be everywhere.

~~~
piokoch
Salary transparency. Let's imagine you have a brilliant employee, you want to
pay her or him twice more than others, because that person truly brings that
much value for your company. Do you really think other employees would say -
yes, this guy/gal is really smarter than we are, she deserves all those money?
Wouldn't such person be bullied by others (think of what often happens to the
best pupil in the class, where you have "grades transparency").

Let me cite François de La Rochefoucauld, "Although no one is happy with his
fortune, but everyone - with his wits.

~~~
Dumblydorr
I’d rather have it that way than at my last company, where I discussed salary
with someone of lesser education and talents, but who was female. She found
out I was making more due to my education and negotiation, then she went
complaining to all of my bosses and HR about a gender pay gap, and come
Christmas time she got a raise much larger than mine so we were making the
same. Even though she didn’t negotiate and had no masters.

How is that fair to me as someone who arguably deserved the higher salary? I
knew more and played the market game better, yet because of my gender I then
make the same as a less productive worker?

Salaries should be transparent and the reasons for higher pay should be merit
based. I left that company immediately afterwards because another one offered
me 50% more to do what the first company wasn’t even thinking of doing yet. So
overall, I think the current system of secrecy and unjustified numbers is far
from ideal.

~~~
ams6110
> complaining to all of my bosses and HR about a gender pay gap

That _is_ negotiating.

~~~
smaddox
No, it's not. It's a lightly veiled threat.

~~~
netcan
Diplomacy by other means.

------
aetherson
The problem here is information asymmetry.

It's hard for employees to know how valuable it is for them to sign a non-
compete. It's hard for companies to advertise their desirability based on,
"those other guys will make you sign a non-compete. We won't." So it becomes
low cost for people to ask for it.

In the current environment, non-competes should be banned: California proves
this is a viable approach. But perhaps a better long term solution that seems
within technical reach right now would be some kind of AI legal assistant that
could demystify and educate people about the contacts they're asked to sign.

Like imagine if you had a smartphone app. You scanned the contract with your
camera and the app said, "This is a non-compete agreement. 60% of the
companies in this field use them. Best estimate is that signing it costs you
$30k in lifetime earnings."

Then a job seeker could just negotiate to their own best interest.

~~~
konschubert
It's also power asymmetry. Some people just can't afford to NOT sign a non
compete. That's why laws and regulations are needed to protect the poor.

~~~
ams6110
The poor are, in most cases, not qualified to do very skilled high-paying
work. That is part of why they are poor. Are the jobs they can get really
requiring non-competes? If I take a job at an Amazon distribution center, am I
going to be asked to agree that I won't later go to Wal-Mart? And if I do,
will Amazon actually bother to enforce that?

Last time I had a decision to make on a non-compete, I did consult with a
lawyer and he basically said there are no guarantees, but generally a non-
compete cannot be enforced if it prevents you from earning a living.

Edit: the article implies that places like McDonald's do this. I worked there
(albeit years ago), and at that time it was not true. We would have been
rightly laughed at if we asked for a non-compete on a minimum-wage job like
that. It was hard enough to hire people who were reasonably well-groomed,
punctual, and energetic. We would not have added unnecessary barriers like
that.

~~~
knute
Just because you didn't have to sign a non-compete doesn't mean there wasn't
shady business going on. What the article is talking about is franchisees
signing agreements not to hire employees from other franchisees in the same
brand. So if a new McDonald's opened up across town with higher pay, they
would not have been able to hire you.

Also there are (or at least were) fast food restaurants making their employees
sign non competes. Jimmy Johns had their sandwich makers on noncompetes until
2016 [0].

0: [https://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/22/jimmy-johns-drops-non-
compet...](https://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/22/jimmy-johns-drops-non-compete-
clauses-following-settlement.html)

------
dotdi
It's simple. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. With
more money, the rich have more and more power to make sure that it stays that
way.

------
mrweasel
Is that actually legal, and enforceable in the US?

The union for engineers in Denmark have basically told its members to just
sign contracts with non-compete clauses, because they aren't actually
enforceable. Not without the company compensating you financially, even if
you're fired.

Assuming a five year non-compete clause, the company should expect to pay you
for those five years. Essentially the worker sign away their most marketable
skills, and that's no free.

~~~
talltimtom
In Denmark the law is very clear on what you can require in a non-compete, and
what level of compensation you must at minimum include. Maximum of 12 months,
and they must give you a 150% old salary one time payment at the onset. And if
you are either unemployed or working in a significantly new job type after
3months they must supplement your salary up to 50% if you old one for the
duration of the contracts.

Owing to the very clear rules, I have never heard anyone from Unions saying
they where unenforceable, so I’m curious if you have any reference on that
part?

------
kevin_b_er
This is because the philosophy of "at-will employment" being good is a lie
sold to the public. It is to benefit the corporation, and thus the rich, and
not the human or the poor.

------
skh
With his Lordship’s permission I wish to leave your manor for another. The
floggings are less intense there.

~~~
C1sc0cat
You jest but labour law in the USA and the UK descends from the "master and
servants act"

~~~
HoochieKoo
The beatings will continue until morale improves.

~~~
thelasthuman
The beatings will continue until they are accepted as a fact of life.

If humans were as free as capital to go where they can get the most benefit to
me, I'd move to Denmark in a heartbeat. Truly sounds like a workers paradise,
at least compared to the USA.

But we aren't free, capital is. Priorities I guess.

------
BLKNSLVR
Established companies all trying to protect themselves from competition
because it's an easier / cheaper approach than continuing to actually compete.

Like when a football team is in a winning position and "goes defensive" to the
detriment of their effectiveness. The problem is, once a company / team
changes their approach to "the game", it's often too hard to change it back.

Capitalism has developed ADD. It's all about short-term reward and for all
intents and purposes the future is too far away to consider.

------
NTDF9
I've never understood why the structural flaw of unfettered capitalism isn't
obvious to most people.

The rich will keep getting richer, at the expense of peasants.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
Historically, the world's "peasants" are enjoying the best quality of life in
humanity's history, even if the gap on paper is widening.

Capitalism is far from perfect but it seems to be the best system we've come
up with so far.

~~~
int_19h
The gap is widening for real, not just "on paper".

And study after study shows that humans very much define happiness in relative
terms. It doesn't matter if quality of life is rising for everybody, if the
gap is rising much faster - you're going to have the populace that is unhappy,
and that unhappiness eventually translates to anger (it has already started
doing so).

You can either work to fix that, or you can wait for torches and pitchforks.

~~~
phd514
> study after study shows that humans very much define happiness in relative
> terms

Whether or not the gap is widening, that definition of happiness is very
problematic. There's something wrong when, as an example, someone is happy
with a "rice-and-beans" lifestyle when all their neighbors have the same
lifestyle but is unhappy with a better "chicken-in-every-pot" lifestyle
because some of their neighbors have caviar and foie gras (insert your
preferred luxury foods).

~~~
admax88q
Problematic it may be, that's what studies show to be the case and you can't
just rewire all humans very easily.

------
vfulco2
Capitalism...workers are just another expense to be eliminated

~~~
liftbigweights
I believe the technical term is liability. Workers are liabilities. You are
right. A part of capitalism is to increase the assets and reduce liabilities.

~~~
FranzFerdiNaN
Which is why it cannot help but create its own downfall. But before that we
will have to end up with that unholy alliance between government and industry
called fascism, as that will be the final attempt to extract wealth from a
society that has been drained, by tapping directly into taxes collected by the
government.

You simply cannot have a system that needs consumers to spend money when its
in every single companies best interest to pay as little, preferably nothing,
to those whose business and expertise you need to survive. You can expand to
other nations as a temporary solution but in the end you will run out of
people to sell stuff to.

~~~
Melchizedek
Not to mention the unholy alliance between the contemporary elite "left" and
capital, called globalism.

The only real counterforce to global capitalism has historically been the
people of a _nation_ , and the populist nationalism of a few nation states has
been the only example ever known of an economic system that has upheld basic
human dignity (whether it has been called social democracy, christian
democracy or something else). This is now going down the drain.

~~~
weregiraffe
> contemporary elite "left" and capital, called globalism

To anyone who is not in the loop (of the alt-right/4chan jargon), "globalism"
is currently a code-word for "Jews".

~~~
Melchizedek
No, globalism means globalism and has nothing to do with Jews. This is simply
an attempt by (extremely well financed) globalists to smear anti-globalists
with antisemitism.

------
choot
1\. Make salaries public.

2\. Have an exchange where we can bid on an individual just like stock market

3\. Remove taxes

4\. Add exchange fee

No salaries exist. No employee is tied to a particular employer. We can get
access to a person if we bid the right amount.

