Ontario bans non-competes and creates right to disconnect from work

https://gowlingwlg.com/en/insights-resources/articles/2021/ontario-legislation-bill-27-non-competes/

by smitop • 5 years ago

575 171 5 years ago

crooked-v• 5 years ago

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.

PragmaticPulp2• 5 years ago

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.

GauntletWizard• 5 years ago

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.

eru18• 5 years ago

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.

dghlsakjg4• 5 years ago

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.

whimsicalism2• 5 years ago

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.

PragmaticPulp2• 5 years ago

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.

doubled112• 5 years ago

As an IT Professional (I've always assumed this was intentionally vague)

You are not entitled to:

    daily or weekly limits on hours of work
    daily rest periods
    time off between shifts
    weekly/bi-weekly rest periods
    eating periods
    overtime pay

https://www.ontario.ca/document/industries-and-jobs-exemptio...

Canada (Ontario specifically in this case) gets a lot wrong as well. Any movement in the right direction is a good thing.

hn_throwaway_99• 5 years ago

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.

mbloom1915• 5 years ago

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

sfifs• 5 years ago

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.

redis_mlc• 5 years ago

This is huge.

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.

traject_• 5 years ago

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.

acchow3• 5 years ago

Ontario is the "California" engine province of Canada

Quick Wikipedia lookup of Canadian provinces by GDP per capita shows Ontario’s at 61k CAD, which precisely matches Canada’s overall

Whereas Alberta’s is 31% higher.

jleyank• 5 years ago

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.

bregma2• 5 years ago

SDP per capital is a poor metric when for years your social service policy was explicitly a one-way bus ticket to Vancouver.

hervature• 5 years ago

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equalization_payments_in_Canad...

antoineMoPa• 5 years ago

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.

dghlsakjg4• 5 years ago

Hardly.

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.

gnabgib4• 5 years ago

Of which westerly conservative neighbours do you speak?

bregma2• 5 years ago

It's true. The wet coast of Canada is like the west coast of the ISA. Ontario is more like New York and Quebec like New England.

digianarchist2• 5 years ago

This is really a non-story going into an election year.

I have never heard of a non-compete being enforced here and the right to disconnect is a guideline with absolutely no teeth.

belval• 5 years ago

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.

ChrisMarshallNY• 5 years ago

They get enforced all the time, with sales, marketing, and executives.

I think that lower-on-the-totem-pole folks are unlikely to suffer, but HR departments love to have as much ammo as possible.

MattGaiser2• 5 years ago

Is it just an American boilerplate type thing? Americans just think they should have non-competes?

As I work for an American parent company and my non-compete covers basically any other security or enterprise company. No IBM or EY or SAP for me.

Ironically the subsidiary I work for is included on the list and the list includes no actual direct competitors.

So walking away to our competitor and building them the exact same thing is interestingly legally fine.

bawolff3• 5 years ago

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.

II2II2• 5 years ago

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).

zdragnar• 5 years ago

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.

vkou• 5 years ago

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.

An outright ban assuages a lot of those fears.

AuryGlenz• 5 years ago

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.

digianarchist2• 5 years ago

Never had a new employer request a former employer’s contract either. That sounds really unusual.

honkdaddy• 5 years ago

I still feel as if a guideline with no teeth is better than no guideline at all.

Kranar• 5 years ago

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.

The commencement of the lawsuit:

https://www.so-co-it.com/post/222748/orbixa-technologies-sui...

The settlement:

https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/jitneytrade-inc-announ...

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.

bawolff3• 5 years ago

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.
The commencement of the lawsuit:
https://www.so-co-it.com/post/222748/orbixa-technologies-sui...

Based on that link, the issue at hand doesn't seem to be about a non-compete (?)

gnopgnip• 5 years ago

In the tech industry, they are commonly enforced in sales roles

Waterluvian3• 5 years ago

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.”

gnabgib4• 5 years ago

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?

Waterluvian3• 5 years ago

Companies will still include them.

Just like “no pets” or anything else that’s very explicitly banned in the landlord tenant act.

jt2190• 5 years ago

Non-competes weren’t really enforceable before.

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.

Edit: Here’s a state-by-state roundup: https://faircompetitionlaw.com/changing-landscape-of-trade-s...

Waterluvian3• 5 years ago

The article and myself are both talking about Ontario, Canada.

lincolnq• 5 years ago

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.

pottertheotter• 5 years ago

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”.

tomrod• 5 years ago

Some of the most successful campaigns I've seen in this pace start at the top.

Karrot_Kream2• 5 years ago

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.

ketzo• 5 years ago

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.

mavelikara• 5 years ago

"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.

jessecurry• 5 years ago

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.

akudha2• 5 years ago

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?

menzoic• 5 years ago

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.

eru18• 5 years ago

We don't _need_ a law. Politicians just want to be seen doing something, and people like to see them do something.

It's just more bureaucracy and fodder for the compliance department.

twobitshifter• 5 years ago

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.

halpert• 5 years ago

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.

teeray• 5 years ago

Mail servers should just be configured to stop delivery between 6p-8:30a of they’re really serious about it.

Have an escalation process in place if it’s that important to reach someone after hours.

mikro2nd• 5 years ago

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.

CaptainZapp• 5 years ago

Or even simpler: Don't use your own device for work related stuff.

I can get work email on my device with appropriate software and configuration by my employer.

But why on earth should I ever do that?

andreilys• 5 years ago

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

AlwaysRock2• 5 years ago

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.

watwut• 5 years ago

The problem has nothing to do with email being sent at night. The problem is about expectation of quick response.

IsThisYou• 5 years ago

such as "my boss just sent me an email after dinner, guess I should act/forward it along").

Wait until 2 AM, then reply to your boss with a question about the email.

baby2• 5 years ago

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.

beckingz• 5 years ago

HR are often the worst offenders.

Sometimes they're great and actually invest in the humans at an organization, other times they are the worst humans at an organization.

ipaddr• 5 years ago

Does this change allow employers to work part time for another company if the company forbids it?

rubyist5eva2• 5 years ago

There's no "right to disconnect", it just makes companies come up with a formal policy. That policy can be: you can't.

Non-competes were never enforceable.

This is just BS toothless legislation from an unpopular corporatist government going into an election year pretending to be pro-worker.

eru18• 5 years ago

Slightly off-topic: corporatist probably doesn't mean what you think it means. Probably just the opposite, actually.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism

rubyist5eva2• 5 years ago

Thank you for the clarification, I suppose what I really might is crony capitalist.

dukeofdoom• 5 years ago

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.

cpaika• 5 years ago

ontario - ngmi

vmception2• 5 years ago

Protip: I read contracts and ignore onerous clauses if I know the state doesn’t support those clauses.

eru18• 5 years ago

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.

vmception2• 5 years ago

in the case of a non-compete, it doesn't matter because you are already not working for them and also not bound to not-compete

yes, it is discretionary, know your leverage and be able to afford it.

llampx• 5 years ago

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.

fartcannon2• 5 years ago

This doesn't ban non-solicitation which is often used to sabre rattle engineering firms into not hiring potential candidates and thus surpresses wages.

Spivak• 5 years ago

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?

eru18• 5 years ago

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.

fartcannon2• 5 years ago

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.

iamtedd• 5 years ago

Why the hell does this site need to know my location?

tombert• 5 years ago

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.

happy-go-lucky2• 5 years ago

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.

happy-go-lucky2• 5 years ago

A lesson learned the hard way:

Being sincerely passionate about something can sometimes backfire on you.

TeeMassive• 5 years ago

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.

IMO

redwood• 5 years ago

Non-competes are holding back NYC tech

maeln2• 5 years ago

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.

[0] https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F1910

dataflow• 5 years ago

What constitutes financial compensation? Can they just claim it's included in the salary?

Edit: Cool! Thanks all.

sunderw• 5 years ago

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.

jcelerier• 5 years ago

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...)

maeln2• 5 years ago

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.

emteycz• 5 years ago

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.

bawolff3• 5 years ago

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.

Again, ianal

ljm• 5 years ago

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.

jamesrr39• 5 years ago

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!)

randomswede2• 5 years ago

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.

jevoten2• 5 years ago

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."

antihero• 5 years ago

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.

chollida1• 5 years ago

- There has to be a financial compensation.

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.

leghifla• 5 years ago

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 ;(

Ikatza• 5 years ago

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.

noctune• 5 years ago

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.

alkonaut• 5 years ago

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.

JGM_io• 5 years ago

I'm Belgium non-competes for employees only count from a certain wage. 36k bruto

lxxxvi• 5 years ago

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.

Ontario bans non-competes and creates right to disconnect from work

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