...anything else wasn't encouraged by the legal system. The 2 parties (Amazon and employee) entered into a voluntary and disclosed contractual agreement.
Also, sometimes it's not feasible/possible to design a system where clients aren't so reliant on individual employees. For example, in the legal and finance professions, certain key people have so much knowledge regarding certain deals / events, that you can't just swap them out. It is a major investment on the part of a company to train and get someone up to speed on a piece of business, and one way to mitigate the risk of them leaving is to have them sign a voluntary agreement to not compete for x amount of time.
Obviously, this can be abused in situations where employers have the upper hand. But in many high powered positions where highly qualified people have a lot of leverage against their employer, it could help reduce costs a lot (for the end consumer also, since the risk of someone leaving and taking the business would just raise the prices you have to charge to mitigate that risk, as opposed to a non compete).
In places like (e.g.) the financial sector, they have compensation for the duration of the non-compete. Many tech sector employers have no such concession. They basically want you to just 'not work' in the tech sector for the duration of the non-compete, which is completely not fair to the worker.
Also, sometimes it's not feasible/possible to design a system where clients aren't so reliant on individual employees. For example, in the legal and finance professions, certain key people have so much knowledge regarding certain deals / events, that you can't just swap them out. It is a major investment on the part of a company to train and get someone up to speed on a piece of business, and one way to mitigate the risk of them leaving is to have them sign a voluntary agreement to not compete for x amount of time.
Obviously, this can be abused in situations where employers have the upper hand. But in many high powered positions where highly qualified people have a lot of leverage against their employer, it could help reduce costs a lot (for the end consumer also, since the risk of someone leaving and taking the business would just raise the prices you have to charge to mitigate that risk, as opposed to a non compete).