JoeMemphis wrote: ↑Mon Jan 09, 2023 9:12 am I can’t imagine a non compete on an hourly sandwich maker would be legal and enforceable in court. That’s my point. JJ would have to prove damages against an hourly sandwich maker. I doubt they can do that without getting laughed out of court.
As far as salaried workers, that also depends on a number of factors. I have seen some non competes that were strong agreements and enforceable and I have seen others that were not. It all depends on the position as well as how the agreement is written and whether the terms are reasonable.
Bottomline, I would agree with a previous poster that you can’t outlaw all such agreements. Businesses do have a right to take reasonable steps to protect their intellectual property and trade secrets.
As usual it's the difference between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law. As other poster's have noted, It seems more a case by case basis and the examples are many.
I've worked through a few sell off's in the construction biz. They always had non compete clauses. Sell your company and you had to agree not to use your contacts to restart another company for x amount of time.
One of the companies i worked for was family run and a bit old school. It was an honor system that trickled down to hourly wager's and even poaching. It was about the time they hired one of the favorite supervisors kids to work in the office. It was basically a favor as the kid barely passed a few votec classes for engineering and was kinda a numb nut. 2 yrs. he worked helping bid projects. Even though he was still a numb nut after 2 years, he did pick up one thing. He knew the companies formulas for bidding. Intellectual property. Anyway, he started thinking he was all that and wanted more when he could barely do what he was doing. When they wouldn't give it to him he huffed off with that property in tow. Man did he use it. He hired on to a rather snakey company which just happened to be a contractor that bid basically the same kind of jobs we went after. It showed the next year. Some of the jobs that should have been gimmy's for us instead ended up to be lost to them.... sometimes by only a few thousand dollars. It took a couple years before we started winning them back. Needless to say, our engineering department had to sign non compete agreements after that.