Employees not succeeding at disconnecting from work is often unintentional, and caused by subtle, pernicious effects of middle managers simply existing and following basic incentives (such as "my boss just sent me an email after dinner, guess I should act/forward it along").
Forcing companies to write down their policy on this seems like a pretty good idea, because it forces HR to actually decide how they want their employees to be treated, and enables middle managers to be held accountable for their actions along this axis.
This sounds like the sort of thing a founder or executive would say to make themselves not seem like the bad guy and shift blame to “middle managers”. There’s a reason that in the world of fraud and auditing that “tone at the top” is such a big focus and not “tone at the middle”.
You’ve never had a teammate who was just ALWAYS online on Slack? Or found yourself working on a weekend because you thought of a bug fix?
I agree that there’s a lot of blame-shifting that happens at work. But lots of people struggle to disconnect from work for non-malicious reasons, either their own or those of someone else.
> You’ve never had a teammate who was just ALWAYS online on Slack?
Yes, but I don't care if they are, it won't make me.
Where it becomes toxic is when the CxOs are on slack 24x7. Then it becomes a company direction, whether explicitly stated or not.
I've also seen the opposite, where the executive team set an exemplary tone about work/life balance in actions and words, so that becomes the company culture.
Yeah after working for a boss who was obsessed with people being always on slack I decided I was done with it. I set myself to offline and in a meeting until sometime next year when I started at this job. No one has ever asked about it and its never been an issue. I hate that slack shows availability by default.
I've been in a company where the the CEO is on slack from 6am to midnight 7 days a week expecting a response within a minute to anything. Extremely toxic environment.
The worst of it, in some sense, is that they don't even do it from an angle of intentionally attempting to overwork people. It's just that they're an obsessive multitasker who doesn't really get that focus-oriented people need focus time, which is the complete opposite of what slack is.
Overwork means the manager can't manage time and doesn't get work done on schedule. Is there some memey site that explains this? Like https://www.managersresourcehandbook.com/lessons-from-bad-bo... (but that site focuses a lot on fluffy stuff like giving much attention to employees).
I don't think it's _not_ the fault of those at the top. Every level needs to be cognizant of the effects of "forward the comms" culture. Ultimately I think it should be the top that takes the responsibility. Unfortunately it seems like the law only mandates writing down the current culture, though hopefully it's the first step to challenging employers based on what they wrote down.
That's what we do at our company FWIW. Lots of people queue up comms to be sent during the start of the other person's business day. It helps a lot especially for folks in other time zones.
As a remote-first company, many of our teams/channels have people spanning five or more timezones. For my team, there is no time that I could send a slack to the channel in which everyone is working (and I think exactly one hour where it’s not 10:30PM-8AM for someone in the channel if everyone is in their home time zone).
Further, I don’t require employees to notify the team if they travel to another time zone temporarily (it’s none of my/our business).
Receiver-side notification settings are the workable answer here IMO. (I don’t care when you respond to the Slack channel; I do care that we can use Slack. Slack has the ability to set your own schedule on notifications already.)
How and why do you even know there's an email in your "work" inbox? Have your devices switch off notifications outside of work hours and you're done. If the sender asks why you didn't respond, explain politely that you didn't see any notification until work started.
eta: If you keep yourself on the hook, that's on you.
If the sender asks why you didn't respond, explain politely that you didn't see any notification until work started.
Come review time you will be dinged for not being a "team player".
Meanwhile the employee that does quickly respond to these messages will get ahead and eventually become your boss.
TBH if something is important enough, I have no problem with responding to it "After work hours", whether it's on the weekend or after work. In the same way, I have no problem taking a long lunch or sleeping in because I know it's a push/pull relationship with work. This is of course much easier to do when you're permanently remote so YMMV
My iPhone only downloads email when I tell it too, even when it does it sits in the background. If I’m not working why would I read it?
If I’m on call like I’ve been over Christmas, I’ll be called by a manager sufficiently high up enough, with a charge code for me answering the phone (4 hours at time and a half), and explain why it was so important to do so.
depending on your calendar tooling, you may be able to have calendar events shared between multiple calendars. And I do understand the whole "not wanting more devices", although it can lead to having a harder time separating work from not-work.
Personally, I have accepted that the only way I can get a decent-enough separation between "work" and "not-work" is to, as far as possible, separating work devices from personal devices. I have a me-phone, and a work-phone. Unless I am on-call, the work-phone tends to not be near me during not-work-hours, it sometimes gets shut off on weekends (unless, again, on-call). I have a work laptop, and a me-laptop (currently about 80 mm apart), the me-laptop stays closed during work, the work-laptop stays closed outside work.
I do some time sensitive work with clients. It's time sensitive because there are often hard deadlines or deadlines that are created and set 25-48 hours out. Clients are often in different time zones.
This is the first time in my career where I have had push notifications for work email on my phone. I don't love it. Mostly because while many of the emails are not time sensitive once I got in the habit of answering things when they come in instead of batching emails (what i've previously done) then every email seems more important and its easier to answer than to know I've got a non urgent email I need to answer at some point in the next 24-48 hours.
I write all of this to say... Not everyone can turn off work email after 5pm.
> "my boss just sent me an email after dinner, guess I should act/forward it along"
I can't understand why the person sending the email after dinner is off the hook, but the person forwarding it along is solely to be blamed in your eyes.
Most C-level folks that I’ve worked with in the past decade have told me that they send messages when they have time, which is often off hours, but they don’t expect a reply until business hours. I’ve heard very few middle managers say the same thing, so a late night message may be perceived differently. But that’s just my personal experience, obviously very situational.
Yes, I've also had managers that start their day at some ungodly hour in the morning and so it wouldn't be unusual to receive emails from them at 5am. There was never any expectation to respond to emails straight away and the same should apply to emails sent in the evening.
One nice feature of Slack is that you can schedule messages to send when the recipient's working hours start. Let the automation take care of keeping messages to working hours.
In smaller companies (where C-level doesn't exist) this works similarly where directors/owners just have to deal with stuff outside of normal hours because somebody has to. Just because they do and have skin in the game, doesn't mean they expect the employees to respond to anything.
Slack helped a lot by making scheduling messages for the next day really simple and not notifying out of hours by default. Outlook could really improve its UX around that functionality - you can schedule messages right now, but it's pretty much hidden.
This is all good. But the fact that we have reached a level where there needs to be a law for humans to treat other humans nicely - that is the sad part. Not emailing after work hours should be common sense and politeness, instead of needing a law, no?
I think you're looking at this backwards which makes it look bad. The reality is, humans haven't been treating other humans nicely in labor relationships for tens of thousands of years. I don't think you'd be able to look back even a decade and say it was better than now, so rather than "reached a level" of inhumanity, I'd say we reached a new level of humane treatment with a law like this. Its just another step in the right direction after centuries of progress. Without laws this good behavior is left up to the culture of the leaders of a company. Its similar to how before child labor laws, some companies didn't use child labor. Now that theres a law for it, no company does (at least on the soil where then law is in effect) which causes the next generation to see this better state as the new normal.
That said, if we need laws for every small thing that should/could be resolved with common sense, where does it end? Plus, we been ultra specialists for everything, when there are a billion laws.
Still, as you pointed out, if these laws improve the situation, it is a good thing I guess. I just hate that everything needs to be enforced with the threat of fines or violence. Another thing is I don’t trust the government to be impartial.
Sometimes a law is a necessity. It gives a level playing field for companies. If one business establishment wants to do the right thing, they have to weight it the financial loss they suffer against goodwill or their own conscience. But if it’s the law, it’s straightforward and since everyone has to abide, the loss of any potential business profit is out of the equation entirely.
It’s something that looks like a stick but really a carrot.
In the history of labor, this would rank as a minor infraction in terms humans failing to treat other humans fairly. The only way out of the mistreatment of employees has historically been enacting laws such as the fair labor standards act of 1938. Without that law we’d still have children working in mines and the 40-hour workweek wouldn’t exist.
My SO is an HR and the head of HR at her place calls her on her personal phone late in the evening all the time. Blows my mind that HR themselves can be inappropriate :D
But imo it’s both people fault: it’s also on you to set boundaries, not use email on your phone, etc.
Complaining middle managers seems so weird in this day and age. In the past, when people stayed at jobs for decades, it made sense to complain about annoyances at work like having ineffective middle managers. However, you shouldn’t be working at a job with ineffective management in today’s world, where it is common to change jobs. If you are, then that reflect more poorly on you than on the managers.
PSA: In a lot of country, non-competes agreement are illegal, at least in the form they usually take. In many jurisdiction, non-compete will only apply when specific condition are met. For example, in France[0], all non-compete have to have :
- a "reasonable" time limit
- a specific geographic region (i.e: only in France, U.E, etc...) -> this is very often omitted, and "the whole world" is not valid.
- The non-competition has to be for a specific activity. This is often not understood and instead you find something like "not work for our competitor" or "not work for a company in this field". This is not specific enough and will be thrown out in court.
- There has to be a financial compensation.
Despite this, almost all the company that I worked for in France had non-applicable non-competes agreement in their contract. None of them offered a financial compensation and none had a specific region.
As far as I know, this is not a France-only thing, and non-competes creeps in almost any employment contract in the world, especially in the tech field. Learn your rights.
> Despite this, almost all the company that I worked for in France had non-applicable non-competes agreement in their contract.
Legal intimidation. There should be a law against this, like "If a company is notified that part of the contract they wrote is illegal, and they keep knowingly pushing the illegal version, they get fined. And they have to send updated versions with the illegal clauses stricken to everyone that signed the old version."
Nope, prison sentences for lawyers/HR. This is the only thing people give a shit about. When I was working in finance nobody gave a shit about fines, the only thing people gave a shit about was the prison sentences potentially handed to people for fucking up AML.
You can't ask an employee to do something that could put them in prison, but you can absolutely ask an employee to do something that risks the company to be fined.
Punishments for lawyers, sure, but I think for HR is a bit harsh. Lawyers should hold responsibility for contracts, and if HR are sending contract without lawyers involver, senior/c-suite should be responsible for allowing such a process.
> nobody gave a shit about fines
Much like doctors (I imagine) fines are inseparable from insurance, and or capital held/made from some activity. Fines covered by the money you made doing whatever you did are symbolic - they need to ramp up each time or they become meaningless.
> You can't ask an employee to do something that could put them in prison
Yes you can. If you think of a company as a collective, prison is an easy way to encourage scapegoating.
I think a better way is license suspension. Break some trading law? You are no longer allowed to trade, all trading business now non-profitable. Required to supply some information proving you aren't up to no good? 30 days to provide it or your business license is suspended, all new business is illegal until resolved.
target business activity and it's harder to do BAU in the face of penalties.
The problem with that is a company can have many parts - fining the entire company for one dept will discourage large corporations. They'll just restructure and push all the risk to 3rd-party/contactors.
Another notable penalty option in finance (though I don't know how strong a disincentive it is in practice) is "You, personally, will be barred from working in the industry." Disbarring lawyers who do things that they know won't hold up in court seems like an interesting policy option here.
Also, one complexity is that you want to phrase it in a way that respects the power differential. It is basically expected in the adversarial system that you raise all the arguments you think might work, and one potential way this plan could rot is "Public defenders get disbarred/imprisoned for making good-faith arguments that ended up not convincing a judge."
That's why I phrased it as only taking effect after a legally-valid notification/warning (or maybe a couple). That way honest mistakes or ignorance of the law doesn't get you in trouble, and penalties can slowly escalate. There's little harm in the occasional illegal clause slipping through, after all - it's the norm that we want to change.
You don’t need the threat of prison sentences for lawyers. All you need is the threat of disbarment. Lawyers will absolutely refuse to do anything that risks them being disbarred.
IANAL, but i think its very similar in canada (even pre the new ontario law). Non-competes are more a threat to hang over workers head than actually legally binding. I think the big benefit of the new law is it removes the threat of a non compete which is present regardless of how legally enforcible they might be.
The compensation aspect is known as garden leave in the UK (probably elsewhere too), although you'll only find it in certain industries or at certain positions in the org.
In a previous job (Belgium), I had a non-compete clause, correctly written except that the "compensation" part was missing. To my understanding, when leaving, I could either:
- claim the clause null and work wherever I wanted
- follow the clause obligations and ask for half of my salary for the 3 years of non-compete
Moreover, when quitting, if they did not explicitly waive the clause, I could also ask for those 3 years of compensation... but they did not forget that when I left ;(
This is very common in finance, the issue often is that in finance you'll often have a low salary that is made up for by a large bonus and capital gains from investing the hedge fund you work for.
So when it comes time for your garden leave the company can just keep paying your salary and not your prorated "total comp" which is often many multiples of your salary for the 6-12 month period you sit out.
Same in Sweden. I have found employment contracts to have such a clause, and for it to be very wide ranging, but the law limits how it can be enforced. To enforce it in court, the employer has to:
- have a specific reason about why you can't work for the new company - you can't just "non-compete" working for another company in an industry, it has to be that you had access to specific know-how that your old employer wants to keep secret from your new employer.
- have the non-compete time-limited, according to how long the know-how is relevant for.
- offer financial compensation (apparently normally the difference between the salary they would have got if there was no non-compete, and the one they did end up getting at another company)
My understanding is that it sometimes happens for people higher-up in the org-chart, and doesn't really happen so much at the individual contributor level. (I'd be really interested to hear other interpretations, anecdotes or case law though!)
Some management, some sales people, some consultants (where there can be a "don't go work for a client you have been recently placed at, for N months after leaving" clause). Mostly, I have seen it done through gardening leave, though.
But, as I understand it (but, then, I have NO legal training), if the no-compete is baked into your employment contract, it is null and void after your employment is over. To actually be valid, it needs to be a separate contract. I would double- and triple-check that before relying on it, though.
It's similar in Denmark. I basically got three months pay in compensation when I changed jobs while under a non-compete - which ironically incentivizes finding a new job.
In Spain is the same, but the financial compensation has to be a significant part of salary, around >30% minimum. I've gotten out of some NC's because the extra compensation wasn't fully detailed or wasn't enough.
Well as you said, the clauses that go over the law are simply thrown away by courts, so I happily sign - it's their problem they don't know their rights.
No, it has to be paid after the work contract ends, either in one go or monthly.
From what I could read the amount must be "reasonable": between 1/3 and 2/3 of the salary depending on how wide the non-compete is (https://www.village-justice.com/articles/montant-contreparti...)
It has to be a financial compensation during the period covered by the non-compete. I think it also has to match your salary (otherwise it would be easy to exploit), but I'm not 100% sure.
This is hard to say and I am not a lawyer. As I understand, the non-competes financial compensation has to be given when the contract end, therefore, it cannot be included in the salary.
Reading the text, they didn’t actually create a right to disconnect from work. They only require employers to write down their policy and share it with employees:
> The legislation offers no guidance as to what must be included in the policy, and simply provides that the policy must include "such information as may be prescribed." This was apparently intentional as noted in the legislative summary in an effort to offer employers flexibility to develop a policy appropriate to its operational needs.
So unless I’m missing something, a company can write down “Employees must be available as needed” or something equally vague and they comply with the policy.
In practice I would expect most employers to write a lot of vague wording about how employees aren’t required to be active online in their off hours, but they’ll leave the door open for emergency communications as needed. No sane company is going to write down a legally binding policy that nobody is going to contact anybody else at certain times. Imagine how easy it would be for a manager to break such a restriction by accidentally tagging an employee name in Slack at the wrong time of day, for example.
The “right to disconnect” seems largely symbolic.
On the other hand, banning non-competes is a big deal. They are effectively banned in my location (and several other states in the United States) and it’s great to not worry about it at all.
As an American working in Canada:
Canada has a much stronger workers rights culture, and tends to have regulatory agencies that can produce results. (At the individual level, regulatory capture at the macro scale is just as prevalent, if not more so in the case of extractive industries).
It wouldn’t surprise me if vague clauses don’t get upheld, or if requiring an employee to be connected also comes with the responsibility of compensation and expenses. When I worked for a company that required me to do on-call on holidays or weekends, I was given an extra vacation day in compensation even if I hadn’t actually done anything but triage.
Work life in Canada seems generally much more balanced from an anecdotal perspective.
I'm in the US, and here very very few jobs have even 1 of those things you listed here. What proportion of the world has those things? Like 7-8 countries total?
Edit: I guess I need to stop commenting at this hour, HN is ridiculous with their down votes when the Europeans are on. God forbid someone tries to ask a question here.
The thing is the above things are not a general thing. Those are rights that IT workers specifically don't have, that are otherwise mandated by labour law. So, one of the countries that has these things is actually Canada (or more strictly speaking, the provinces of canada, since this is provincial jurisdiction but they all broadly follow the same formula including afaik this exemption).
IT is not the only field with these exemption but it is perhaps one of the least motivated. Afaik, it was added to the list when most IT workers were working in critical infrastructure like telecom. It's not really justified anymore, if it ever was (imo it isn't justified for anyone, but I am probably rare in thinking that in an entrepreneur-focused space).
Don't blame the Europeans, Americans downvote anything in favour of freedom of contract (or against unions etc) just as well.
It's not quite as bad as reddit, yet, where you get downvoted to hell for suggesting that the rule of law is preferable to mob violence against people accused of being 'parasites' or accused of certain crimes or thoughtcrime.
My state has legally mandated lunch every 6 hrs and overtime pay past 40 - mind my asking which state you're in? It sucks if those are all absent in both Ontario and in general here.
I live in Toronto. Ontario enacted those laws targeting IT professionals in the 1990s to attract "IT companies" by making things flexible for them. This was before the current acute tech shortage. As somebody who entered the tech field circa 2003, I saw companies take advantage of some of these early on (especially related to overtime). Nowadays, I can pretty much dictate the terms of my employment.
> When I worked for a company that required me to do on-call on holidays or weekends, I was given an extra vacation day in compensation even if I hadn’t actually done anything but triage.
This also occurs in the US and is more due to tech labor market tightness.
It's part of the market. But it's not the only driving force.
Employees can't magically 'expect' their total comp up or down. But expectations can drive how that comp is commonly split between eg salary and benefits like longer lunch hours.
No, expectations of employees + supply and demand are the market. If your job is in high supply, your expectations matter very little because there will always be someome more desperate willing to work in worse conditions.
> If your job is in high supply, your expectations matter very little because there will always be someone more desperate willing to work in worse conditions.
'Always' is an exaggeration, but yes, that's the gist of it.
> It wouldn’t surprise me if vague clauses don’t get upheld, or if requiring an employee to be connected also comes with the responsibility of compensation and expenses.
According to the link, this is not the case. It seems very clear that the only requirement is that the policy is written down.
> When I worked for a company that required me to do on-call on holidays or weekends, I was given an extra vacation day in compensation even if I hadn’t actually done anything but triage.
That's been standard practice every place I've worked in the United States, too. Not by law, just because it's a decent thing to do.
When I was working for Google as an SRE, oncall hours counted like 2/3 of normal hours. Whether an incident happened or not. (To give teams an incentive to clean up their service!)
You had the choice of idling off those extra hours with extra vacation or to get them paid out.
Oncall hours tracking was capped at 15% of normal hours, to give you an incentive to distribute oncall equally around the team. (I never heard of anyone seriously hitting that cap.)
Overall, seemed like a well-thought-out and fair system to me.
I'm A-okay with just clarifying the policy. I carried a pager, and got paid well for it. I no longer do, hut absolutely would again for the right compensation.
Yes, absolutely. People in software get paid well enough and have enough other options that freedom of contract is the best policy.
Let people know upfront what they are getting into, and then let them make their own choice about whether it's worthwhile or not.
There might be some argument about whether this kind of 'consenting adults' approach to labour regulation is the right or wrong approach for less well off people. (Many people seem to think that the poor are like kids and need to be protected from themselves by someone who knows better what's good for them..)
But for people in the ever-booming field of software, that's a hard argument to make.
> Many people seem to think that the poor are like kids and need to be protected from themselves by someone who knows better what's good for them
That's not the reason. If you're poor, you are likely desperately looking for a job. This means that if you are offered one with shit working conditions, but that pays better than your current situation (which might be zero!), you HAVE TO take it. Most people have nearly zero bargaining power in their employment, which is why we need regulation especially for them.
And yes, while in a highly-valued field like IT, we usually have enough bargaining power, regulation still helps us. If the baseline was "just don't beat your workers, everything else is legal", we'd have a lot more to negotiate first, before we even got to the things we negotiate these days like benefits, loose schedules, work from home, etc.
And it's not like we can't fall on hard times either. Not everyone that is paid well is rich. They might be the main source of income for a large family or a have sick or old relatives to take care of. Or they might be at the start of their career without any savings. Bargaining power comes from the ability to quit, which comes from the ability to find a new job before your savings run out. No matter your industry, finding a job still takes time, so if you don't have enough savings to cover that time, you're in no better of a position than the poor person from the first paragraph.
> And yes, while in a highly-valued field like IT, we usually have enough bargaining power, regulation still helps us. If the baseline was "just don't beat your workers, everything else is legal", we'd have a lot more to negotiate first, before we even got to the things we negotiate these days like benefits, loose schedules, work from home, etc.
Nah. Compare eg restaurants. Food safety is strictly regulated in many countries, but taste ain't. Still, you can walk into most restaurants and get something reasonably palatable. No need to laboriously negotiate the taste.
Similarly, in place and times when there was no minimum wage, people didn't typically negotiate their compensation from a baseline of zero. The baseline is what's prevalent in the market.
(My adopted home of Singapore doesn't have a minimum wage today. Germany and Hong Kong only got theirs relatively recently. The pre-20th-century US didn't have one either, yet was the target of many migrants.)
> And it's not like we can't fall on hard times either. Not everyone that is paid well is rich. They might be the main source of income for a large family or a have sick or old relatives to take care of.
The second part isn't really a "right to disconnect from work" as much as it is forcing employers to be explicit as to whether the job allows you to disconnect from work or not. That's still a step in the right direction, though.
This is great news for Ontario. Prohibition against non-competes is probably the best thing a jurisdiction can do to incentivize new company formation and startups.
It cost me almost half a million dollars over 6 years to defend myself against a lawsuit that would have otherwise been dismissed had it genuinely been the case that non-competes were unenforceable by statute.
For the most part that settlement happened because the company suing me went bankrupt and its successor didn't feel like continuing to pay legal fees for a case they knew they would lose. Ordinarily I'd be able to recoup legal fees, but I was advised that recouping fees from a bankrupt entity is all but impossible.
> It cost me almost half a million dollars over 6 years to defend myself against a lawsuit that would have otherwise been dismissed had it genuinely been the case that non-competes were unenforceable by statute.
I have known people who have declined work over non-compete clauses since it adds an element of risk to accepting the position. I am talking about those with low income who cannot afford to hire a lawyer to tell their ex-employer's lawyer to take a hike since such clauses are non-enforceable.
With respect to the right to disconnect, simply having a written policy will help in many instances. I have worked for organizations where upper management generally frowned upon employees being contacted outside of work hours for anything more than checking a person's availability to work or telling a person not to report to work. Yet lower levels of management never seem to receive that message (possibly because they are expected to be on call).
What low income jobs have non-compete clauses? Not that I don't believe you, just trying to wrap my head around it.
A non-compete is (ostensibly) intended to protect employers' trade-secret-esque internal knowledge and practices, which low income jobs don't really get much exposure to.
Granted, many non-competes are legal boilerplate that businesses probably shouldn't need, but I can't imagine a business actually doing a cost/benefit analysis on paying legal to go after someone who makes peanuts.
My favourite (mostly because I know the details and personally trust the source) was for a cashier position in a small grocery store in a small city. When the applicant tried to negotiate on the terms, they were told that someone could just walk away with their supplier information. While it may have been a legitimate grievance, it was a poor excuse to harm someone's future employment prospects. (Small city == limited choice.)
> It seems a bit silly to me, as it seems to cost the employee more than the benefit the employer receives from that clause.
Are you surprised employers can exploit unskilled laborers? It's not silly. It's asymmetrical power resulting in exploitation of people who don't have many options in jobs they can find.
> For the unskilled labourer, it doesn't matter much whether they work for Burger King or McDonald's.
It also doesn't matter for those companies which cashier out of the 100s of applicants they hire. Your only power as an employee is the power to quit and if you can't guarantee that you'll get a new job quickly enough, you're powerless.
You’re assuming a extremely tight labor market, which may be true since about a year ago, but definitely has not been true for at least a decade before that.
Before the current tight labor market, if someone who was living paycheck to paycheck found themself unemployed, they took whatever job they could get. Maybe they apply for 10 jobs and only hear back from 1 for an interview. They have hungry children to feed and don’t have any money for groceries. The employer understands that most applicants are desperate for any job so can tack on any terms they want - such as a non-compete.
Here is Wikipedia article on non compete clauses. Seems like they are quite common everywhere with various restrictions. Amazingly North Dakota and Oklahoma also have a total ban in non-completes along with California.
FWIW that was only intended for store managers, who are (or at least were) flown to Champagne, IL for multiple weeks of training.
Having worked at JJ’s, I don’t think they were taught anything remotely with a non-compete. I think they just didn’t want somebody becoming a manager and then using that to get a better job across the street. Training employees is expensive.
Do you mean intended for store manager and applied to store managers only, or intended for store managers and applied to everyone (because template/boilerplate [0])? This press release [1] states it covered positions more junior than store manager.
As an aside: interested if anyone knows what is meant by copyright in the press release above:
>Madigan’s suit alleges the companies required all employees to sign a non-compete agreement, which the company claims is covered by copyright, as a condition of employment.
[0] I experienced this. Would recommend to anyone to at least question any condition you don't like, even if you aren't able to negotiate. I was taking a low-level position at a large organisation so I had no real leverage and had a condition crossed off because it was meant for full-time and fixed-term employees but somehow made it into my casual contract, presumably because it was part of some boilerplate.
> Do you mean intended for store manager and applied to store managers only, or intended for store managers and applied to everyone (because template/boilerplate [0])?
The latter. My guess is that (for non-managers) it was boilerplate and nobody either noticed or cared enough to remove it. It's not surprising—lots of weird, sometimes contradictory stuff ends up in contracts.
I could _maybe_ see them trying to enforce it on a store or district manager if the manager decided to split immediately after being flown out to Illinois, or something. But I recall multiple managers leaving to go work at other fast food places—some even on bad terms—and nobody was ever sued. One manager even stole large sums of money and they basically said, "Oh well."
JJ's likes to pretend it's a fancy QSR, but it's all bark. You have to learn the menu and pass a test before you can get hired, but in reality you can bomb the test and still get hired. They have a strict dress code, but it's only enforced when corporate comes to do its yearly reviews. I don't see them caring enough to ever go through the effort of suing an employee for a non-compete.
But it's been 10 years since I worked there, so perhaps things have changed.
Non-competes don't have to be enforced to have a chilling effect. Your new employer may refuse to hire you because they don't want to get into the legal fight that determines whether or not non-competes have teeth.
I live in a rural area and I know of someone that happened to. They worked for Hormel, jumped ship to another employer in the food production business who found out they had signed a noncompete. They got let go and no longer had any job.
I agree that non-competes being enforced are uncommon. I've never even heard of it happening in Canada.
That being said, my contract with AWS stipulates that I can't work for their competitors, it's insanely wide so I don't see how it could realistically be enforced, but I still signed it which means that technically I can't work for Azure/GCP. I would much rather see the practice outlawed entirely so as to not have to worry about it.
I had an interview with amazon (canada) once. In order to get to the onsite interview (not a job offer, just the interview) they wanted me to sign a crazy non-compete (contingent on me accepting an offer if i was eventually offered one) that forbid me on working for any compeititor to amazon at all, including areas they intend to compete in the future, even if i was unaware of their future plans to compete.
It seemed obviously unenforcible, almost to the point of being comical. But i took it as a giant red flag and declined the interview.
> Is it just an American boilerplate type thing? Americans just think they should have non-competes?
No, they aren’t even legal in California so it’s just some employers and in some states. The financial ones in NY are actually pretty reasonable because employers will pay you during the time after you leave when you aren’t allowed to go to a competitor. Not sure if that’s legally require there or just the market expectation.
AWS is based in Seattle and WA does have non competes so almost every tech company there will try to have you sign one. One of the reasons why Seattle will never become a real tech hub. And I’ve never seen any stipulations of payment while non compete is pending for engineering roles
Are you mixing up gardening leave and non-competes?
In any case, I think above some level of compensation basically all crazy clauses that people agree to voluntarily should be fine as far as the law is concerned: there's no need to protect well-off people from themselves.
There might or might not be an argument that poor people need to be protected from themselves like little children, and thus that there should be some contracts they shouldn't be allowed to enter. (Just like we only allow some very carefully considered contracts for children to enter into. Eg buying candy is fine; but going into debt is not enforceable against them.)
I’m in the Vancouver, BC area and there are a few Canadian companies that have non-competes that I’ve heard of. These are not tech based companies either.
Slovenia reporting - non-competes exist but the company has to be paying you at least 1/3 of your average salary of the last 3 months with the company each month for the entire duration (max 2 years) to not compete.
At a previous employer, as soon as I finished a task, my manager would go on assigning me cumulatively more work than what I was supposed to do. Not surprisingly, they could easily sense my reluctance to take any more of it, so they would try to sweet-talk me into doing it, say, "You always do a good job!" and the like. Most of the time I didn't know how to respond to such wily tactics, which I would describe as quite insincere and exploitative.
> prohibition against non-compete agreements with employees
I've dealt with this recently, although it was in Québec where civil law applies so I don't know if it's the same. Here the case-law limits non-compete agreements to about ~1 year (most likely 6 months), to a specific relevant geographical area (think a county) and to a specific industry and if any of those clauses are not respected than the whole non-compete agreement is invalid. In my case they made the agreement to "companies offering engineering services", which was clearly abusive and thus I could get my new job after lawyers talked.
I understand why they want to make it illegal, it has the potential to screw over many people and be very unfair. But there's a perverse effect of not having those is that establishing trust to climb the ladder will much more difficult since the trust barrier is set higher since nothing will stop someone from working to a direct competitor. This has been a real huge concern in places I used to work and I know from confidences that was made to me that people were constructively fired for not being trusted enough. IMO they should just have made it more restricted.
Non-competes weren’t really enforceable before. I’ve been there with an infantile CEO and talked with lawyers about it.
Perhaps there’s some value in making it explicit, yet again. But I think this is one of those frustrating “another law for something we already have a law for.”
This depends completely on the jurisdiction and the circumstances. Non-competes in California and Texas are largely unenforceable (but not completely), whereas non-competes in New York and Massachusetts are enforceable.
They weren't, but companies still included terms in employee's contract.. and "not really enforceable" still requires a (legal) fight.. this is better, no?
I work for an American parent company in Europe and I believe we have some blanket non-Compete clause in our contracts. I have no idea whether anyone actually thinks it’s enforcible. I haven’t heard of an employer suing an ex-employee, nor have I heard of an employer rejecting a candidate based on a non compete.
So I’m happy to go work for a competitor and reimplement exactly what I’ve just done at my current job. If they really want me to not work for a competitor I’d be willing to discuss it but it would cost upwards of what I’m making as an employee.
non-compete rule does not apply to:
"Executives, defined as "any person who holds the office of chief executive officer, president, chief administrative officer, chief operating officer, chief financial officer, chief information officer, chief legal officer, chief human resources officer or chief corporate development officer, or holds any other chief executive position."
lol - cofounder is fine, as well as board member, head of sales... really whatever you want your title to be
As far as company rehulations are concerned, these titles have specific meanings, powers and liabilities. You can call the positions anything like Tesla does, but as far as regulators are concerned your company will still need to define some of these roles/accountabilities in specific people.
Oh man, I hope something like this hits New York soon.
One of my biggest frustrations when working at Apple was how awful and draconian their non-compete was. California law protects Californians a bit in this regard, but I was working out of New York, and as a result those protections didn’t apply to me.
Be careful. There's multiple aspects to a contract.
At the most adversarial, a contract is what you use as the basis for litigation, if it comes to a legal fight.
But a well written contract is meant to avoid costly litigation, by making clear what both parties expect from each other.
In practice, contracts are often boiler plate and lots of provisions do not apply, but would still be legally enforceable. While other expectations apply, but are not in the contract or are not enforceable.
To give a silly example: many of my employment contracts specified some pro-forma working hours like 8am to 5pm. That was never enforced.
But: if I had annoyed my employer in a way that the legally binding parts of the contract did not specify (eg by breaking an onerous clause that wasn't actually legally binding), they could have used those other clauses to annoy me. Or just fired me for officially unrelated reasons, or no official reason at all.
You have a point with a non-compete, but it's a matter of degree: there are certain obligations that persist after your employment, and some of them are legally binding, even if a non-compete ain't in your jurisdiction.
Just two posts above is an example of someone who got let go from their new job when they found that he signed a non-compete at his previous job. Easy enough to bounce back from in the right labor market, not so easy in others.
This doesn't ban non-solicitation which is often used to sabre rattle engineering firms into not hiring potential candidates and thus surpresses wages.
I’ve never seen this actually applied to or even talked about with engineers because it’s absurd. What software engineer is directly selling to customers? Is there somewhere that has had them enforced?
I think the comment you mentioned might talk about non-solicitation in the sense that the former employee of company A who's now working for company B can not solicit the remaining employees of A to work for B?
Funny enough, I helped plenty of people from past employers to find new jobs; but never with my current employer, but typically with some other past employer.
I was talking about all the consulting engineering firms full of civil, mechanical, electrical, transportation, etc, engineers. Among these jokers, it's extremely common practice. As a side note, in Ontario 'engineer' is a protected title and most (but not all) programming jobs wouldn't qualify.
But since this is a US website about programming/business, you're probably not going to talk to a lot of Ontarians about programming or engineering, so this is probably useless information for you. But hey, there you go. Trivia night.
More people will be working from home. So more rules are needed around setting reasonable hours between personal time and work time.
The vaccinated have now matched the case count and hospitalization number of the unvaccinated. So come January, probably even more people will be working from home, because Ontario seems to be headed for another lockdown.
Ontario is the "California" engine province of Canada, similar in geographic size and sophistication. It subsidizes the rest of Canada (the "have-nots"), but it can afford to do so.
To give you an idea of how sophisticated Ontario is, most Hollywood comedians and a large percentage of writers are originally from the Toronto, ON area because of their writing and self-production abilities.
Ontario universities have a direct brain-drain pipeline to SV, but this will help them return later in their careers.
That's quite the Kool-Aid. I am also from Ontario and have the exact opposite conclusions as you.
> It subsidizes the rest of Canada (the "have-nots"), but it can afford to do so.
This is only a very recent phenomena that they are not getting equalization payments [1]. Even then, it's mostly because of the bottom provinces falling even further than Ontario rising. Don't even be tempted to blame this on the rural areas as Toronto alone accounts for about half the population.
> To give you an idea of how sophisticated Ontario is, most Hollywood comedians and a large percentage of writers are originally from the Toronto, ON area because of their writing and self-production abilities.
Such a sophisticated engine cannot keep them?
> Ontario universities have a direct brain-drain pipeline to SV, but this will help them return later in their careers.
From my personal experience, other than interns and students, I don't know a single Canadian who opted to build a career in the US and later to return.
> To give you an idea of how sophisticated Ontario is, most Hollywood comedians and a large percentage of writers are originally from the Toronto, ON area because of their writing and self-production abilities.
Haha, that's just because Ontario has a large population with respect to Canada as a whole. Sophistication is not the right word to use as someone from Ontario.
One has oil/gas and the other has money/tech. And I'm not sure per capita is the proper metric if you're looking at funding a country rather than comparing them.
Have you played Mass Effect, used Java or OpenBSD? One has natural resources and money and tech. Different parts of Canada bring different things to the table.
> It subsidizes the rest of Canada (the "have-nots"), but it can afford to do so.
How? I was wondering if you were talking about equalization payments, but it looks like Ontario is sending none and it used to receive payments from other provinces during most of the 2010's.
Also, many provinces may claim to be the California of Canada based on different aspects (laws, taxation, proximity to west coast, health system, climate, car-centricity - where Ontario would win, etc.), but this has the same value as cities claiming they are the new SV: not so much.
BC has the real title of Canadas California! We have unaffordable housing, restrictive zoning powered by aging hippy boomers in multimillion dollar homes, temperate weather, and a massive film industry.
To top it off we resent our conservative neighbors to the East and have a chip on our shoulders about our overlords in the east.
BC is definitely the California of Canada.
The thing that unites all Canadians though is our strong belief that our neighbors to the south are dangerous and run by a corrupt and incompetent political system, regardless of their suitability as a winter vacation spot. Which… I guess is a feeling that the Americans have too.
Forcing companies to write down their policy on this seems like a pretty good idea, because it forces HR to actually decide how they want their employees to be treated, and enables middle managers to be held accountable for their actions along this axis.