Non-Compete Agreements

The infamous non-compete agreement, which the Federal Trade Commission attempted to largely eliminate in 2024, remains normalized in the American workplace, affecting some industries in particular.  Such agreements entail acknowledgment by the employee that they will not work for a competitor for the duration of employment and often for a year or more after leaving the role, either due to voluntary departure or involuntary termination.  These arrangements protect the company's financial interests, usually at the expense of the employee's ability to make a sufficient living without branching into other industries or to (more) easily find new work after leaving the organization.  And what if the company begins—or already was—underpaying the worker during the employment period?  This obviously jeopardizes a current or former employee's financial standing.

The company might easily still remain existent and profitable a year later if large or well-entrenched enough, but the employee might have a much more challenging year—or two years, as one might hear about some non-competes lasting even longer than 12 months.  What if the employee has devoted so much time and energy into their role within a very specific company in a very specific industry that it would be highly difficult to enter a separate industry or subcategory of an industry, as adhering to the non-compete would dictate for a time?  Even if the employee saved money beforehand, prolonged unemployment, especially when someone is trying to break into a new occupation, can reduce savings and leave the terminated worker genuinely struggling to survive until the specified duration expires.

Well, non-competes are exclusively about protecting the company in much American practice.  Internal measures such as an employer commitment to providing the worker with stable hours would help safeguard against them even pragmatically needing to seek additional employment, but while it is logically possible for non-competes involve mutually beneficial protections or commitments, again, the terms of many do not.  They solely favor the employer by restricting the pursuit of other jobs in the industry even after an employee no longer works at the former's business, which can have devastating consequences for the latter.

If non-competes equivalently uplifted workers while still employed at an organization (better-than-livable compensation [1], guaranteed hours, etc.) and were less punishing afterward, there would not be an inherent problem with them.  As with so many aspects of my country's business practices, it is not the basic concept that is erroneous in some way.  How it is implemented or the version of the concept in question can make an enormous difference—a difference that leaves workers in a state of desperation or artificially heightened vulnerability.  Hiring an employee does bring about a degree of vulnerability for the employer as well, yes, but the reaction is very often to put the employee in genuinely oppressive circumstances.  It does not have to be so.

Companies cannot exist or function without people, not even a sole proprietorship.  Yet, in my country and probably many others, the corporate organizations comprised of people, which are pure social constructs, are regularly advantaged over the people at the bottom of the employment hierarchy.  Businesses and the government do little to nothing to make working life anything more than a means of bare minimum survival and one of the most stressful parts of practical life.  Where a job accessible to the majority of workers or those seeking work does allow for anything beyond this, it is not necessarily because the job was structured this way intentionally.  It might very well have just happened to permit such security for the employee.

[1].  Livable compensation is a prerequisite of rational, just business practice whether or not a non-compete is involved, but it would still alleviate how one-sided and oppressive many non-competes are in their current form.  Better-than-livable compensation could certainly make it worthwhile for an employee to agree.