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Comment by wahnfrieden | Hacker News Reader

why advocate for allowing them? what's in it for workers?

fully paid vacation for as long as the company wants to enforce the non-compete? Or you get another job and get free double salary while working in a completely unrelated industry?

I think the parent comment was pretty clear that what's in it for workers is a bunch of money.

Having to take two years of time off of work can be really detrimental to some careers in some fields.

For as much as capitalists love free markets, they really hate the idea of employees selling their labor in a free market.

That's why you get paid, to compensate you for the detriment.

Employees should have the option to refuse the payment and go ahead and compete. Then it would be up to employers to make sure the offer is attractive enough that employees would want to take it. That's how a free market works.

> Employees should have the option to refuse the payment and go ahead and compete.

Absolutely! But in reality NCs are mandatory parts of accepting employment to begin with, and it's a very broken power dynamic because I need this $150k job a hell of a lot more than my employer needs me as one additional person.

Additionally, a non-compete that only matches your existing salary isn't enough. There is a super strong compounding effect of

1. You haven't worked for two years, your value going back into the labor market could be much lower

2. Your income could have grown tremendously in those two years instead of forced to be the same

3. The net effect between 1 and 2 means you're not just behind the effect of 1 on its own, you're now actually super far behind

4. You now have two fewer years of your working life for your salary to compound

5. The savings you could have made in those years at a higher income level also aren't compounded as they would have been in your investment portfolio

You dont need non competes in order to do as you propose here though

Fully paid vacation is sometimes called garden-leave. In my country, you have to pay some salary during non-compete but it is nowhere near your full salary (1/10th in most cases).

1/10 of a salary for all but the upper echelon of worker compensation does not seem sufficient to put food on the table.

Normally high earning employees have non-compete clauses that are enforced.

There are some jobs (for example as referenced elsewhere hedge funds) where employees have knowledge that could be directly damaging to their former employer if it were taken to a competitor.

For example, other Fund X has a huge short position in a company. The way that finance solves this is by paying employees to stay unemployed (and not take their potentially damaging information elsewhere).

There isn't really anything directly "in it" for workers, so paying them out for their time seems reasonable.

So why not make it generally illegal except in very specific circumstances?

Or how about allow for knowledge of one firm being shared with the other being illegal since it’s proprietary (I think this is probably already the case).

That's very hard to police and prove. It's easier if you pay them to be unemployed for long enough for their knowledge to be less valuable. This is very common with businesses like hedge funds. But I agree non-compete should be narrowly allowed and only in situations like this that are more equitable.

Yeah I agree. Why even allow them at all?

I think allowing them but forcing companies to pay is a way to make them put their money where their mouth is. While I think removing them is good, removing them completely gives the opposing crowd something to yell about. If you allow them but then say, well you gotta pay to get the benefit, I think we'd quickly see them drop off, the proponents of non-competes would have little to no argument, and companies who really think they need them can just pay for them if they're so valuable to their business strategy.

If history's any indication, you can't give companies an inch. They'll take advantage of employee ignorance of the law, or do shady things with the payments under the logic that if the employee sues them for the money they can tie the case up in the legal system until they give up, or whatever other chicanery they can imagine to squirm out of having to pay.

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