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Comment by LapsangGuzzler | Hacker News Reader

I read somewhere that in countries like the Czech Republic, employers who deploy non-competes have to pay 100% of that employee's salary, which makes sense to me.

Put a reasonable financial burden on companies to prevent abuse. I'd happily sign that agreement.

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Better than nothing but this is still a clear screw job for the employee. Ideally it would be 100% of their wage at a market rate - not the rate set by the previous company. Most people get a pay bump when changing jobs, so the previous rate is generally below market value. But also having to take 1-2 years off from work makes landing your next job a really pain in the butt. Would you want to hire someone and then wait around for a year before they start? Makes it harder to forecast and it means a project takes an extra year to ramp up? Good luck trying to join a start up.

An outright ban on anti-competitive/anti-labor policies is just much simpler for everyone involved.

I get the appeal of a “garden leave” where you make your salary but don’t work. It’s a nice break after hard work before your next thing… but can you “quit” and voluntarily leave early?

If you can quit the extended severance period, it would force employers to pay the market rate of their anti-competitiveness. If someone’s salary is X and they find a new job at 1.25X, then some would take X to do fully paid vacation for a few months after quitting, but surely some would force the old employer to pay up.

> this is still a clear screw job for the employee.

It's board members only. Non-compete clauses, overall, are not a thing in the EU.

That happens in some parts of the US finance industry, where it's called "garden leave".

I thought one complication over garden leave is that the payout is set on base compensation where finance may be heavily skewed towards bonuses/equity.

This is pretty solvable in contract law. With engineers it's even easier, if compensation is more predictable.

The garden leave I’ve experienced was a negotiated payout. It was more than my salary but less than I’d potentially made if I hit all bonus targets. Importantly (in the US) it included health care.

Legislating this would needlessly complicate things. California is doing OK for itself on the world stage and it does not allow non competes.

California is explicit about it but virtually no state enforces them.

Many do. Ohio, Michigan, NC to name a few

Massachusetts has a tendency to enforce

Yeah but workers don't know that

Here (another EU country) non-compete clauses are only enforceable for management and above and can't be longer than six months, even when it's customary to write down that clause in pretty much all employment contracts.

Likewise, most tech sector companies also claim ownership to all IPR created by their employees, but by law that is only limited to actually patentable inventions.

It's pretty much the EU, also non-compete are generally applicable to board members only.

It should be 200%

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