No state enforces non competes that endanger someone's ability to work in their profession unless the company provides compensation during the unemployment period.
Hope you have the funds to see that through to completion including all the appeals! It’s not like tortious interference is a crime the state would prosecute—just like violating a non-compete isn’t a crime where the state would prosecute. Civil actions are handled via lawsuits and they’re expensive.
No state in the country will force a worker onto unemployment in order to enforce a private party's non compete. None.
And what “certain pay out?” The company sues the former employee, if the employee wins they get to keep their job, effectively making that job cost millions. The employee would have to countersue, and that would carry quite a lot of risk of failure even if the employee wins the original suit.
But I agree overall that relying on lawsuits to work this sort of thing out is just not practical.
In my case, employer didn't want to pay. Hired some lawyers to send a letter saying that either they paid me or the non-compete was invalid and ended up getting paid full salary for the duration.
That's going to be a pretty harsh limitation in itself.
“If your previous employer sues you they will lose” is not the counter you think it is. You were lucky they didn’t litigate and luckier still that they didn’t consider a non-compete of outsized importance like that Wisconsin company does: Some employers are extremely litigious, and will try to exhaust you in court because they believe they’re protecting internal secrets.
That sort of thing must not be discounted when considering what advice is appropriate in this kind of situation—and especially what the overall policy of a society should be: If the company I referred to above were a California company and you were an employee in California, “they will lose” and “you won’t spend millions” (or at least “you’d recover costs”) would actually be accurate.
Still, what I understood at the time is that, if the employer is not paying you at all during non-compete period, they will have a hard time enforcing it anywhere.
I am also surprised by the claim that it could cost millions to litigate about something like this, how confident are you of that number?
(And about CA, my understanding was that noncompetes are simply to allowed there, so it wouldn't even apply)
That specific company is delusional about where their profit comes from; they (specifically their founder/CEO and the surrounding execs) think it’s because of their awesome “ultra secret” technology and not a combination of regulatory and inertial lock-in. Like, they literally think their MUMPS codebase and the non-relational database backing it are what make them great, rather than something they’re successful in spite of. (And it does, to the degree that it encodes a huge amount of domain knowledge—derivative domain knowledge, based on the law, regulation, and insurance policies…)