Nördnytt! 🤓New Washington state law bans noncompete agreements
www.seattletimes.com - 169 poäng - 52 kommentarer - 11397 sekunder sedan
Kommentarer (12)
- jeffreyrogers - 7049 sekunder sedanThe only time I see non-competes as reasonable is when someone sells a business. It seems fair to put a territory restriction on a seller so the new owner doesn't have to immediately start competing against the person they bought out.
- tzs - 5216 sekunder sedanThe article covers this, but probably worth having it mentioned here too: Washington already had partially banned noncompete agreements.
They were banned for employees who made less the $127k/year or contractors who made less than $317k. Those numbers were adjusted annually for inflation.
Edit: less/more mixup fixed
- otterley - 6257 sekunder sedanWhy wait until 2027, instead of making it effective immediately?
- softwaredoug - 6704 sekunder sedanIt’s not the noncompetes that’s the problem, it’s confidentiality agreements with extremely broad language.
Learn about the legal principle of “inevitable disclosure”. It’s the idea you can’t work for a competitor because you can’t help yourself but violate an NDA
- mitchbob - 9354 sekunder sedan
- dismalaf - 5617 sekunder sedanThis feels a tad heavy-handed and will make it tougher to sell a business without hard assets.
It should just be banned for employees or require a payout of (previous salary) * (length of non-compete).
- sheikhnbake - 9059 sekunder sedanBig ups for pro-working class legislation
- toomuchtodo - 11369 sekunder sedan
- matthest - 6415 sekunder sedanA win for Adam Smith capitalism.
- Analemma_ - 8508 sekunder sedanIt always baffles me how much resistance there is to banning noncompetes every time this is proposed, and how that resistance lives right alongside “we want to be the next Silicon Valley”, even though pretty much every analysis of “what’s Silicon Valley’s secret sauce” cites the unenforceability of noncompetes as one of the most important factors. But maybe the ship is turning very slowly.
- SilverElfin - 5465 sekunder sedanWA has bigger problems like crazy overspending at the state level and many cities, leading to a spiral of new taxes, even if they are unconstitutional (at the state level). This new noncompete law won’t be enough to make the state more attractive to workers and businesses. It has nothing to really offer above California.
- lateforwork - 7373 sekunder sedanThe flip side should be considered as well. There should be some sort of protection for small startup companies. A big company should not be able to steal an innovative startup's technology by hiring away the employees that worked on the product. That used to happen a lot when Bill Gates was running Microsoft, for example.
Patents provide some protection, but it is flawed because a big company can put you out of business if you get into a patent war. An employee should be able to leave at any time and work for a competitor, but maybe should not do identical work, otherwise startups will have a hard time protecting their IP.