I saw recently that my current state of residence, Minnesota, will be banning employers from using non-compete agreements as terms for employment. Full disclosure—while I signed such a non-compete agreement myself when joining my current employer, I am not impacted by this law for a couple of reasons. For one, it doesn’t go into effect until July 1st, 2023, and all non-competes established before that date are still considered valid. Second, it only applies to employers based in Minnesota, and while I live here, the agency that employs me is not based in Minnesota, so that too prevents me from being impacted. That said, I am very much opposed to this ban, and believe it will do much more harm than good.
I’m not of the opinion that non-compete clauses are a universal good, of course. Like most things in life, they have upsides and downsides, and whether the costs outweigh the benefits will be different for different individuals facing different circumstances and trade-offs. The costs are fairly obvious—they put up a barrier to finding new employment after one departs their current job. So, what are the benefits?
One benefit is increased wages. Employers must offer higher wages to prospective new employees to make them willing to accept a non-compete as part of their terms of employment. To see this, just engage in a bit of introspection. Imagine you had two job offers from two different employers. Imagine that everything about the job offers was the same—the type of work, hours, paid vacation, family leave policy, and so forth. The only difference between them was that Company A requires to you sign a non-compete, while Company B does not. Immediately, that makes Company B seem more attractive, all else equal. In order to overcome that, you’d require Company A to offer you higher wages than Company B. Or more vacation, better working conditions, longer paid family leave—there are multiple margins that can be adjusted. But the point is that you’d need something about Company A’s offer to improve relative to B, to make you willing to accept that extra restriction. Are those offsetting benefits “worth it?” The answer for that will be different for everyone. In my case it was, but unlike the legislators and governor of Minnesota, I don’t consider myself fit to determine a single, one-size-fits-all answer to be imposed on everyone else.
Non-competes also provide benefits to employers. Using my own circumstances as an example, as part of my employment, I’ve taken training and acquired certifications for electronic medical records systems, in order to both more effectively perform my job and increase the number of clients I can assist. This training and certification process was sponsored and paid for by my employer—and it’s not a simple or cheap process. There are benefits to employers in investing in the skills, training, and certification of those they employ. But the willingness of employers to do so will be diminished with the prospect that they might sink the resources into providing an employee that training, only to have that employee immediately jump ship to a competitor, sticking them with the cost while their competitor gets a better trained and credentialed employee free of charge. In the absence of non-competes, employers will be less willing to invest in providing their employees with the kind of training and support that will help them advance their careers long term—so employees will bear some of this cost too.
Again, I’m not saying that non-competes are universally worth it. Some people will find them their best option, others will prefer options without a non-compete. But legislation like this is likely to be either useless or harmful in any given case. If an opportunity involving a non-compete isn’t a given worker’s best option, according to that worker’s own preferences and values regarding the trade-offs involved, then the new legislation is useless because the worker wouldn’t have signed the non-compete anyway. And if an opportunity involving a non-compete is the best option for a worker, the legislation will be harmful because it’s taking away that worker’s best available option and forcing them into an arrangement they find less beneficial. There is no one-size-fits all answer for things like non-compete agreements—regardless of what the legislators and the governor of Minnesota dictate.
READER COMMENTS
Daniel Carroll
Jun 20 2023 at 1:10pm
The problem with non-competes has been transparency and abuse, similar to they way IP protections are sometimes abused (i.e., use of the threat of litigation to claim non-existent protections). There is usually an asymmetric power dynamic between employers and employees. Since legislators are bad at anticipating all abuse patterns, it is easier for them to just ban the practice. It gives them a PR boost and they don’t have to think about it too hard.
In certain circumstances there can be negative externalities – reduction of competition and reduced knowledge diffusion, plus some ripple effects that may gum up the overall labor market.
The cost-benefit trade-off described here is fine at the individual level, in a well functioning non-compete/labor market.
MarkW
Jun 20 2023 at 2:15pm
One of the potential problems with non-competes is the ‘Do you want to be the one employer who…’ question. So, ‘Do you want to be the one employer in an industry who offers the most paid vacation (rather than higher pay)?’ The answer is generally, ‘no’ because you don’t want to be the one employer who attracts the least ambitious (on average) employees who put the highest value on leisure time and the lowest on money.
The same potential problem applies to non-compete clauses — do you want to be the one employer in an industry that does not require them (but pays a bit less)? No you probably don’t — not unless you want to be the ‘stepping stone’ company where employees start to gain experience before jumping to a higher-paying, non-compete company. Thus, it seems like the equilibrium is for entire industries to coalesce around requiring non-competes, which in practice, is the equivalent of employers colluding in agreement not to ‘poach’ each other’s employees (as the tech industry was once busted for doing).
steve
Jun 20 2023 at 1:11pm
I think that there are a few situations where they are merited but they are mostly immoral, forcing people to move if the employer does not provide a good working environment.*They are now near universal in my specialty. There is no increase in pay for signing a non-compete. The hospital would lose nothing if I left or anyone else in my specialty. People dont come specifically to my hospital to go to the ICU. It’s really about controlling people. I pay for most of my own training. You dont need a non-compete to make up for specialized training. What makes more sense and is the norm, I believe, in that situation is to require a specified time commitment or pay back the costs of the training. A non-compete doesnt stop people from leaving, just from leaving and working nearby. The hospital would still lose money if you left. We have several people go to Hogwarts to become EPIC programmers and that’s what we did even though they already had non-competes.
“then the new legislation is useless because the worker wouldn’t have signed the non-compete anyway.”
Often untrue. They are near universal in my specialty and in others. The places that do not require them tend to be in lower level facilities in rural areas where I really wouldn’t be practicing at my current level.
Outside of medicine, what is the purpose of having employees sign a non-compete when they work at a fast food restaurant? You dont really believe there are big secrets at those places do you? Even if there were they would be revealed as soon as people left.
You might suggest this should go to court but having gone over this many times with many different lawyers in 2 different states, challenging a non-compete is expensive and it’s essentially a crap shoot in our states. It all depends upon the judge with the facts of the case not especially relevant. The employee can withstand the costs of litigation much better than the employee also.
Steve
steve
Jun 20 2023 at 1:12pm
I put paragraphs in that. Not sure why it became a wall of text.
Steve
T Boyle
Jun 20 2023 at 1:13pm
My initial instinct is to agree with you.
On further consideration, I don’t.
One of the legal constraints even many (most?) libertarians can agree fall within the proper role of the state, is prohibiting anti-competitive arrangements – even if they would, in the short run, improve efficiency and possibly outcomes for both sides.
Noncompete clauses are anti-competitive. There have been reports of entire industries adopting non-compete clauses, effectively (if not explicitly) colluding with each other to eliminate the option of choosing another employer in the same field. This would enable employers in that field to treat employees substantially less well than they would have to, if the employees were able to threaten to leave. In effect, an employee’s human capital would largely become the property of their employer. It’s not wrong to be deeply troubled by this prospect.
We could imagine a similar situation being applied to consumers: “you may buy our product (car, computer, electricity, online service, etc.) only if you commit that, within a multi-year period of buying a product from us, you will not buy a comparable product from any of our competitors”. If one company does it, you either label them weird and you don’t buy their product; or you go along if it’s much cheaper or better and it’s worth it to you. If all of them do it, there’s no longer a real “either/or” – you only get to choose whose tied customer you will be (one vote, one time).
So, I disagree with you.
However, I could be more supportive of narrower limitations. If only a small number of employers in a particular field do it, it could be harmless (although, in general, we do not allow anti-competitive behavior at all). Better, an employer could spell out the reason for the restraint and provide a reasonable alternative to it – for example, if you leave within 3 years of receiving training X, you will repay a pro-rata share of the cost of that training – etc. Or, the employer could spell out reasonable restrictions, such as “you may not take any documents from your current job to a new one”. Of course, both of these types of restriction are already common; they’re also much less objectionable.
Jon Murphy
Jun 21 2023 at 11:53am
Can you point to some examples? At least in the field of law & economics (which is more than just libertarians), most libertarians and classical liberals oppose the state prohibiting anti-competitive arraignments.
Jonathan Monroe
Jun 26 2023 at 9:23am
The early Law and Economics writers (I think it is in David Friedman’s Law’s Order among other places) gave the common-law doctrine that contracts in restraint of trade are unenforceable unless specifically shown to be reasonable as an example of the kind of sensible pragmatic rule that emerges from the common-law process.
In England, the doctrine was codified in 1711 – in other words it predates modern capitalism. In the United States, the 1899 Circuit Court opinion in Addystone Pipe holds that the Sherman Antitrust Act should be interpreted as a restatement of the common-law rule.
So the idea that non-competes qua non-competes are not like other contracts is neither new nor controversial. Nor, of course, is the idea that contracts of indentured servitude are not like other contracts – the politics of non-compete bans is very much being driven by the idea that overbroad employee non-competes are used to create de facto indentured servitude.
So the idea that “employee non-competes should be enforceable” is a simple application of libertarian freedom of contract doesn’t really hold up.
Jonathan Monroe
Jun 26 2023 at 9:39am
And reading the rest of the thread reminds me that the majority of employee non-competes fall into a third box of contracts where there is a perfectly good classically liberal case against enforceability – they are contracts of adhesion which deliver a surprising and apparently unfair benefit to the side drafting them.
At common law, contracts of adhesion were generally valid but were interpreted contra proferentem – but in any case “If I want to f**k with you I can fire you and you have to move across the country to get another job” is not a clause that you would want someone to sneak through in small print.
Jonathan Monroe
Jun 26 2023 at 9:53am
5 minutes of googling found a recent criticism of employee non-competes from a free-market perspective at the AEI.
Dylan
Jun 20 2023 at 1:52pm
I’m of a similar mind as T Boyle, my inclination is to agree with you, but I’ve seen non-competes become so endemic that it leaves me conflicted. A few years back I signed a non-compete to get a job that didn’t pay me anything, and literally the only reason I’d take the job was to gain experience that would allow me to get a job that did pay something. Yet, the non-compete was written so broadly that almost anything I did afterwards could be considered a violation. I ended up taking the job and signing the non-compete (after failing to negotiate a weaker one) primarily because the company was based in California where non-competes are generally illegal and I spoke with some lawyers that said this one had zero chance of being enforceable. And I’m glad I did! I learned a ton and was able to leverage that into a well paid job (with full blessing of the org that I’d signed the non-compete with). If I’d expected the non-compete to be fully enforceable, I’d probably have made a different decision. Of course, it is hard to say what the world would look like in that case. Would other potential employees have been deterred? Would the organization still have had such a strict non-compete in that world? The thing that left me discouraged was the fact that none of the other people who had the same job as me, had even bothered to read the agreement before signing it.
I’ve also heard that places like McDonald’s are now using non-competes for their entry level restaurant workers forbidding them from getting another job in fast food in the same area for some period of time. Which just seems insane, even accounting for the fact that they have training costs to recoup.
Dylan
Jun 21 2023 at 6:36am
Just heard this story yesterday from a friend. Her daughter started working at a fast food chain in the city near where she lived. 6 months later she gets in a fight with her mom and goes and moves in with her dad on the other side of town. She doesn’t drive, so she wants to get a job at the same chain but owned by a different franchise owner nearer to where she now lives. Manager tells her no, you signed a non-compete. So, she’s getting her dad to drive her 40 minutes to and from work 3 days a week.
David Henderson
Jun 20 2023 at 4:25pm
Nicely done.
I especially like this excerpt:
johnson85
Jun 20 2023 at 5:43pm
This is a perfect example of why libertarianism will never gain more than a sliver of the population as adherents. Non-competes are a pretty big societal negative. Pretty much any legitimate purpose they serve could be handled with a combination of a non-solicitation agreement and a training cost reimbursement agreement. Granted the training cost reimbursement agreement does get dicey for internal training and how you accurately account for costs and what can be counted as training.
Anybody with any significant experience with non-competes will see how they are abused. And once you become open to the idea that yea, it’s good to have government regulation of anticompetitive practices, then I don’t know what principal there is that limits it to anticompetitive practices. Or even how to precisely define anticompetitive practices.
T Boyle
Jun 20 2023 at 6:54pm
First off, I think you’ll find that libertarianism has made enormous strides, even without many adherents in the population. That’s because libertarianism benefits governments, who have tended to become more libertarian over time in many respects (not all – tax rates, which are far higher than they were in the age of monarchs, are a notable and substantial exception) because it makes them more powerful and successful – even if libertarian policies are not what the governed prefer.
This is an example of why I claim that libertarianism is a philosophy of government, and how it is to be clearly distinguished from anarchism, a philosophy advocating absence of government. People often have trouble differentiating one from the other; indeed many anarchists position themselves as libertarians to appear more acceptable. But, the two philosophies are quite different: anarchism is aimed at those who do not wish to be governed; libertarianism is aimed at those who wish to govern well.
Libertarianism, as a philosophy of government, suggests that government – in its own long-term interest – should first ask itself, “is there really no practical way to accomplish this socially necessary/desirable goal, other than regulation?” and not “what regulation might accomplish this socially necessary/desirable goal?” – the latter being how regulation is usually approached by members of the public who want to see that goal accomplished. If the answer is “yes, there are other practical solutions” a libertarian government would try them, possibly over the objections of many of the governed, who might want a more direct, regulatory solution. But, if the answer is “no, there is no other way” then libertarianism would accept that regulation may indeed be necessary.
Libertarians generally accept that governments should enforce contracts. Why? Because totally free markets (with only private enforcement of contracts, i.e., reputation and private violence) do not scale well. Since the benefits of markets are enormous, markets as a method of allocating resources have become government policy across much of the world – with great success. These markets are regulated – indeed, it would be accurate to say that these markets are built from regulations. As you say, there is ultimately no clear boundary to how much they can, or should be regulated: it’s a judgment call. How exactly to make that judgment call is an open question. After all, libertarianism is a philosophy, not an algorithm.
Jon Murphy
Jun 21 2023 at 11:56am
You state that non-competes are “a pretty big societal negative” and yet they persist. Workers voluntarily agree to them, firms voluntarily offer them. Given that those two groups are part of society, we have to be careful in claiming they do not know what they are doing is bad for them, especially when alternatives exist and are obvious. Perhaps your last sentence is a bigger problem than you expect?
Jon Murphy
Jun 21 2023 at 12:29pm
I should say that the sentence who which I am referring to that “is a bigger problem” is this one:
Johnson85
Jun 22 2023 at 10:44am
This is the whole “market fundamentalism” that people complain about. Markets aren’t infallible because people aren’t infallible and it’s so naive and stupid to say “it must be good because people keep agreeing to it.” It’s a perfectly legitimate position to think that it’s better to allow bad things than to have government try to prevent them because government won’t just stop bad things. But it is frustrating to see people that shut off the intellectual process because “markets good”. Yes, markets are good. They’re amazing. And it would probably be slightly easier to convince more people if so many adherents could recognize the difference between amazing and infallible.
I literally just advised somebody against signing a non-compete. Told her that there was no legitimate purpose for it and the only reason they were doing it was because they wanted to make it harder to leave, and the only reason they would want to make it harder to leave was because they were expecting employees to want to leave. She would have had a very easy time getting a job without moving had she refused and I think it would have been hard for them to fire her if she refused. She didn’t want to make waves, so she signed it. And sure enough, a few months later, they started “restructuring” benefits to make the job worse. Now she’s regrets it and she doesn’t even realize that she hasn’t seen anything yet. She’s been getting raises that keep up with inflation and of course that’s over now.
I’ve seen it over and over again and that’s not even work that I do. It’s just it’s so prevalent now that I have friends or colleagues semi-regularly reach out to me about it. Out of the dozen and a half non-competes I’ve been asked to review (and the many more I’ve seen in employment agreements), I’ve yet to see a legitimate need for a non-compete. Literally every single one I have seen could have accomplished any legitimate purpose with a non-solicitation agreement and reimbursement for training. I’ve only seen a couple that actually make a pretense at trying to be fair to the employee.
Another reason you can tell they are not for legitimate purposes is you never see them sunset. If it were really about recouping training costs and making sure employers had an incentive to provide training, you’d see the agreement structured to be tied to training. Maybe for newer employees that go through extensive training, employers require more time to recoup their costs. But that’s not how they’re structured because that’s not what they are about. They generally just want to make it harder for the employee to leave.
A couple of other egregious uses I’ve seen. Similar to the story above, a firm brought all of it’s sales people a non-compete. People that had been working there for years. Were told it’s just part of updating their policies after a recent acquisition/merger. These are salespeople that could have easily just been given a non-solicitation agreement prohibiting them from reaching out to existing clients or even clients identified through their current employment. They restructured the sales incentives shortly thereafter that resulted in lower incentive pay for new sales but more importantly more or less an end to incentives tied to retaining existing business.
I’ve seen them implemented before layoffs, so people not only lost their jobs but were also told they had to move their family or change industries (which obviously would usually entail a significant pay cut).
I’ve seen one instance where I really think the entire process of getting non-competes was implemented because of a desire to fire one person. Guy was pretty awful, but basically his employer put him in a position where in order to keep his house he had to move away from his family for two years essentially. The other choice was to stay local but still presumably have to move his family or raid retirement to keep paying the house note. I didn’t care for the guy, but while he had legitimate character flaws in the way he treated people, he didn’t do anything to deserve that.
Jim Glass
Jun 20 2023 at 8:38pm
T Boyle wrote…
Nah, we can’t. (Btw, exclusive distribution agreements are perfectly legal – but I won’t digress.)
Noncompetes, in principle, are a form of (yup!) IP protection. In practice they range from entirely justified-and-necessary to grossly exploitative. Yin vs yang examples…
[] You spend years building a business which now has major contracts obtained only after long intensive negotiations with and wooing of customers. If a competitor of yours …
* pays somebody to steal your company’s files containing your customer lists and the details of their contracts and what you had to do win them, and the competitor takes the info to use againsts you, that is grossly illegal theft of valuable assets embodying IP.
* pays a big hiring bonus to your chief negotiator to quit you and go work for it, bringing all the same information in his head … um, that’s just a guy innocently moving to another job?? That’s the clear case of what noncompetes are intended to prevent.
The same principle applies to unique work skills taught to an employee by the company at its own cost for its own benefit. They are “proprietary information in the brain” too.
Noncompetes wind up in court all the time when there are $$-stakes like this involved. To be upheld they can apply only against movement to a new employer that would actually use what the employee takes, and only within a reasonable limited geographic area, and for a reasonable amount of time. And it is much better if one is negotiated individually with the employee. Of course, litigation is very expensive, so…
[] The firm of Cheap Dumb & Greedy forces noncompetes on all its workers as a condition of employment, down to the janitor. The terms bar workers from working for anyone else, ever, anywhere. The firm thinks: “This’ll keep our payroll down. What are they going to do, sue??? Not on what we pay ’em! Ha!”
The average incidence is in the middle of these two, the median down towards the bottom. In theory the rules for a valid noncompete are clear and fair. In practice, it’s entirely subjective what ‘unique work skills’, ‘reasonable time’, ‘reasonable area’, ‘reasonable et. al.’ are, with 50 states and the feds doing the subjectifying, so, well, it’s a subjective mess. And litigation is very costly, so there is no way to litigate lower-$$$-value cases on the merits.
Thus, there is a lot of incentive to create simplifying rules across the board. Minimize the transaction costs. Noncompetes, like so many other things in life, are neither/both good or bad, it depends.
steve
Jun 21 2023 at 11:44am
Most of what you describe could easily be handled by non-disclosure agreements and contracted time to pay back training. Both would actually make more sense as a non-compete would just stop you from working locally but you could move and take all that knowledge with you. So the large majority of non competes are harmful.
Rejecting the supposed one size fits all law means that you are accepting current one size fits all law with non-competes being legal. This is just another case of favoring the status quo that just happens to favor employers.
Steve
Jim Glass
Jun 21 2023 at 11:10pm
Most of what you describe could easily be handled by non-disclosure agreements and contracted time to pay back training.
On the principle of: “Never fail to double+ transaction costs by using two more complex contracted agreements when one simpler one will do”? And, employers could unilaterally impose those as a condition of employment as readily as they do noncompetes.
Both would actually make more sense as a non-compete would just stop you from working locally but you could move and take all that knowledge with you.
Yes, a noncompete just stops you from working locally (for a competitor of your employer), but you can move and take all that knowledge with you. That’s what you want, isn’t it? So that’s good.
So the large majority of non competes are harmful.
???
This is just another case of favoring the status quo that just happens to favor employers.
Did my description of the firm of Cheap Dumb & Greedy read to you like favoring the employer? Or the status quo?
T Boyle
Jun 20 2023 at 10:19pm
“um, that’s just a guy innocently moving to another job??”
Yes, it is. Best to keep that in mind when deciding how to structure your negotiation team and incentives.
Jim Glass
Jun 21 2023 at 8:01pm
“um, that’s just a guy innocently moving to another job??”
Yes, it is.
Oooh. Theft-for-pay is so ‘innocently’ cool!
Best to keep that in mind when deciding how to structure your negotiation team and incentives.
Yup, that’s exactly why employers use contractually agreed to incentives such as those embodied in “noncompete agreements.” Note the word “agreement”.* The employee agrees to it, just as with any other contractual agreed incentive. But you object to such!?
Of course, the thieving negotiator and competitor that bribed him in this case likely would be nailed to a barn door via federal trade secret laws and the like … but that’s costly and noncompete agreements are far more efficient.
Brazen gross theft is anti-competitive, anti-economic, and socially harmful, a bad thing. (It’s odd to see a libertarian applaud it.) Deterring such at the least cost is a good thing!
~~~~
* The problem with noncompetes that leads to laws such as in Minnesota is that so many are not negotiated by employees but are imposed on them — effectively making them adhesion contracts, which are a whole other barrel of brine.
Mark Brady
Jun 21 2023 at 12:17am
As I read Kevin Corcoran’s post, it occurred to me that analogous arguments could be made in defense of selling oneself into indentured servitude. Is it just a question of degree or is there a another principle that kicks in if we move from debating non-compete agreements to debating indentured servitude, or even selling oneself into slavery?
For the record, I am opposed to both indentured servitude and so-called “voluntary” slavery, as are many (most?) self-identified libertarians and classical liberals. And I’m not suggesting that Kevin or any other participant in this conversation would defend either indentured servitude or “voluntary” slavery.
Knut P. Heen
Jun 21 2023 at 11:21am
I see nothing wrong with indentured servitude. It is a form of debt contract. Many poor Europeans financed their ticket to America this way. They had no money or collateral so they promised to work for x years to pay for the ticket. What is wrong with that? In fact, everyone who gets an advance on their pay from their employer is doing this even today.
I see nothing wrong with non-compete agreements either. The argument for using these is that some employees get access to information that should not come in the hands of the competitors. Barring them from interactions with the competitors for some years may be useful because it is easier to prove violation of a non-compete than to prove the leaking of confidential information. What if Trump suddenly showed up as Putin’s right hand man? Would that be okay? I guess most people would call it criminal behavior.
Jon Murphy
Jun 21 2023 at 11:30am
I don’t follow. Non-competes are fundamentally different from indentured servitude. A non-compete is not the same as a non-quit. One can leave their job at any time; they just cannot go to a competitor. With indentured servitude, one cannot leave until one’s contract is up.
steve
Jun 21 2023 at 4:30pm
Actually, you can go work for a competitor, just not within the defined geographical area. A non-compete defines an amount of time and a geographical area. The area can vary a lot depending upon the type of job.
Steve
Jon Murphy
Jun 21 2023 at 7:08pm
Yes, I know (I was subject to a Non-Compete for my last job). But all that is irrelevant to my response to Mark.
Jim Glass
Jun 21 2023 at 10:24pm
13th Amendment, 1865.
You can’t legally be compelled to work for another if you don’t want to, period, no matter what your contract requires you to do. Although you may get hit with a tall mountain of damages for breaking your contract.
Also, a court may prohibit you from working for a competitor of your employer’s. The clear big-name example that springs to mind (for those old enough) is Rick Barry, an all-star player with the NBA San Francisco Warriors who jumped his contract for big $$$ to play in the competing ABA. Eventually the courts enjoined him from playing professional basketball for anyone not the Warriors, so he returned the them. “Eventually” being five years later – “the law’s delay”.
JdL
Jun 22 2023 at 4:37am
I agree that the government should keep its big fat nose out of whether employers require a non-complete agreement. That question is entirely the business of the employer and employee, no one else, and government intrusions into such matters infringe upon rightful and essential liberties. That said, when my own company suddenly decreed that every existing employee must sign a non-compete agreement, I refused, and the company blinked rather than getting into a pissing contest.
I’ve never bought into the notion that employers have some sort of unfair advantage over employees. Anyone who takes the trouble to acquire valued skills has plenty of negotiating power in the marketplace.
Billy Kaubashine
Jun 25 2023 at 9:28am
The free market (non-governmental) natural push-back to non-compete agreements would be for employees to unionize and use their collective power to force employers to cease the practice.
If I was a union organizer, I would use employee dislike for non-competes as an organizing. If employers saw non-competes as a welcome mat for union organizers, they would be more judicious in their use of them.
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