Yesterday, when the bad reviewer was surfing the Internet, he found that the topic of "the United States announced a comprehensive ban on non-compete agreements" was hung on the first hot search.
Netizens discussed it fiercely.
Some say that ordinary workers really shouldn't be restricted by non-compete agreements, because it will restrict the flow of people and stifle innovation.
Some netizens feel that the abolition of non-compete agreements will make it more difficult for small enterprises to retain their core backbone.
A netizen is brain-open, thinking that this operation is completely convenient for American chip factories to go to TSMC to grab people.
Some netizens pointed the finger at some domestic companies.
To tell the truth, in the past two years, there have been a lot of big news about the non-compete agreement in China, and the United States is indeed a bit ruthless when it suddenly comes like this.
The bad reviewer also took this opportunity to talk to everyone about the non-compete agreement.
First of all, what is a non-compete agreement?
In fact, you don't need to be confused by this name, in China we generally call it "non-compete agreement".
A common non-compete agreement in China
It is a kind of contract signed between the company and the employee, which generally requires the employee to not jump to the competitor of the original company (or even related enterprises) within a certain period of time after leaving the company, including but not limited to joining similar positions in competitors, starting a business with related projects, etc.
As compensation, enterprises generally give employees a certain amount of compensation, which is generally part of the basic salary before leaving the company (according to different contracts, there are different proportions, but it is usually between 20% and 60% at home and abroad).
For example, when Shichao signed a non-compete agreement when he joined the company, then after he resigned, the bad reviewer would continue to pay him a basic salary in accordance with the non-compete agreement, but if he turned his head to the "bad reviewer" and brought the core fishing culture of the bad review, then we can ask Shichao for compensation according to the non-compete agreement.
This is what the United States has completely banned this time.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) began this work back in January last year, and finally narrowly won by a narrow 3-2 vote at the end of last month, and will ban the abuse of non-compete agreements nationwide in August.
Prior to this reunification, many states in the United States, such as California, did not recognize non-compete agreements.
Some states have certain restrictions on non-compete agreements, such as Colorado's 2022 regulations that employees must earn more than $112,500 per year, must be for the protection of trade secrets, and the scope of restrictions cannot go beyond the scope of trade secrets.
Previously, different states in the United States had different restrictions on non-compete agreements
Only this time, the FTC was ruthless, directly in all 50 states of the United States.
So how big is the scope of the restriction this time?
Let's just put it this way, according to the new FTC regulations, as long as your annual income in the United States is less than 151164 US dollars (about 1.09 million yuan), you are not subject to the non-compete agreement.
Moreover, even if your annual income exceeds this figure, as long as you do not hold a decision-making position in the company, you still do not need to be bound by a non-compete agreement.
According to the FTC, less than 0.75% of executives are bound by a non-compete agreement.
The FTC has also calculated that without the restrictions of non-compete agreements, the United States can generate more than 8,500 new start-ups, 17,000-29,000 patents per year, increase the annual income of ordinary workers by $524, and reduce health care costs by $194 billion.
Of course, this kind of thing that seems to be happy for everyone and ordinary people, there are still people who are unhappy.
For example, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said on the same day that it would sue the FTC, which they felt was an abuse of power and would weaken the competitiveness of American companies...
Therefore, it is not certain whether the non-compete agreement in the United States can be finalized in the end.
The reason is that, on the one hand, non-compete agreements can indeed protect trade secrets; On the other hand, because the non-compete agreement is too "ancient".
The earliest and most unpretentious non-compete agreements originated from the human system of mentoring and apprenticeship.
In ancient times, when apprentices learned a craft from their masters, they would either sign an agreement in advance, or they had established rules:
Anyway, the apprentice can't compete with the master to do the work, otherwise it will be "deceiving the master and destroying the ancestors".
With this universal value, the master can confidently pass on the mastery at the bottom of the box to the apprentice.
By 1414, the first non-compete dispute in history had arisen: John J. The Dale case.
The protagonist of the dispute is named Dell, who wrote a letter of guarantee when he followed the master to learn the craft, saying that he would not go to the town where the master was to fight with the master for half a year after completing the study, but Dale did not keep his promise.
So, the master took Dale to court.
Ultimately, the judges felt that such a guarantee itself violated the principles of free trade, and Dale was right.
Therefore, in the early days, everyone mainly conducted a moral trial on the matter of non-compete agreements, and did not really implement them.
And in 1711, the first case in history to enforce a non-compete agreement appeared: Mitchell v. Reynolds.
Reynolds rented his bakery to Mitchell and promised that he would not sell bread in the neighborhood for the next five years, otherwise he would pay Mitchell £50.
As a result, it didn't take long for Reynolds to break his promise, so Mitchell came to the door to ask for a debt.
In the end, the two went to court, and Reynolds still used the argument that the right to "free trade" is sacrosanct, but this time the judge changed his mind and finally ruled that Reynolds lost the case.
This British case, worth up to £50, probably did not expect that hundreds of years later would be cited many times by Americans across the ocean as a reference.
With this bill as an example, non-compete agreements have gradually become more and more stringent "mandatory provisions".
However, due to the lack of standards and restrictions on non-compete agreements for a long time, and the record of the non-compete agreement court is very good, this has led to everyone entrapping private goods into it, and the more they use it, the more comfortable it becomes.
As a result, non-compete agreements have become the corporate standard for more and more companies, and this speed is accelerating.
In a 2014 survey by the Economic Policy Institute, 18 percent of companies in the U.S. used non-compete agreements.
But by 2017, nearly half of the companies with more than 50 employees had adopted non-compete agreements in some of their businesses, and nearly three-thirds of companies had imposed a non-compete on all employees.
As a result, about one in five U.S. workers (about 30 million) are now trapped in a non-compete agreement.
The most outrageous thing is that more than half of the non-compete agreements restrict hourly workers...
It is equivalent to that as long as you shake a cup of brown sugar and raw milk until my bad review, you can't go to the next door to make a brown sugar loquat milkshake.
Not only are the restrictions on jobs outrageous, but even geographically more and more exaggerated, and the restrictions of a large number of worker non-compete agreements are often national or even global.
Nowadays, to exaggerate it, it is almost to the point where people and ghosts have to sign a global non-compete agreement, and some netizens feel that the non-compete agreement has simply become a new era replacement for the deed of sale.
The increasingly outrageous non-compete agreements have clearly deviated from the purpose of protecting the commercial interests of enterprises in the early days.
In 2016, the famous American sandwich chain Jimmy John's non-compete agreement caused a lot of uproar.
As a sandwich chain, Jimmy John has been asking employees to sign non-compete agreements since 2014, requiring them not to work in any sandwich business-related business within a few miles of his store.
But Jimmy · John, who has more than 2,800 stores in 43 states, is a non-compete agreement that employees are essentially saying goodbye to the sandwich industry.
Later, after an investigation in Illinois, it was found that Jimmy · John's purpose is not entirely to protect so-called trade secrets, but more to lock low-wage workers in their own positions, so that the company does not have to raise wages because of employees' job hopping and leaving.
Eventually Jimmy · John was forced to stop enforcing the non-compete agreement and took the initiative to pay to educate the public about the non-compete agreement.
Similarly, in many cases, non-compete agreements have lost their original meaning, and have become a tight spell used by enterprises to lock up employees, so that employees do not dare to use job hopping to fight for more salaries, which also gives companies more room to reduce employees' salary levels, reduce their benefits, and so on.
When the FTC collected public opinion from the whole society, it received more than 26,000 messages, of which more than 25,000 people strongly supported the FTC's total ban on non-compete agreements.
In fact, this phenomenon has been taken seriously by the U.S. government for a long time, as early as the Obama administration, they called for national action on non-compete agreements, and then many states in the United States have gradually tightened restrictions on non-compete agreements.
Only now, the United States has finally solved this problem in an all-round way.
Back in China, the issue of non-compete agreements has gradually attracted attention in recent years.
For example, in 2022, a major battery manufacturer was exposed to the restriction of non-compete agreements, almost indiscriminately prohibiting its technical employees from entering any enterprise that competes with the company.
The editorial department of Zhiwei has also made special reports on the unreasonable non-compete agreements of some major Internet companies in China.
Even the left and right jumps of the anchors of the live broadcast platform in the past two years, and the news that finally led to the sky-high compensation contract, etc., are all cases of abuse of domestic non-compete agreements.
Behind these reports, you can always see the extremely unreasonable abstract fact that "the monthly salary is 8000 and the job change is claimed by million".
Judging from the experience of colleagues in the editorial department, many of them have had the experience of signing a non-compete agreement in their previous work experience, although they have not yet encountered the situation of being enforced, but they are a little afraid to think about it.
Because in the workplace, many people do not understand the meaning of non-compete agreements, or even if they do, they will choose to endure it because they are afraid of losing their jobs.
It seems that these situations also happen quite often in the United States
At the end of last month, the Supreme People's Court of the People's Republic of China issued a number of typical cases of labor disputes, including those involving non-compete agreements.
It is clarified that in trial practice, "the people's court should not only try whether there is a competitive relationship between the new employer and the original employer, but also whether the employee is a person who should bear the obligation of non-competition".
In fact, outside the law, what makes the bad reviewer feel even more embarrassed is that in China, the Internet giants are the ones who are the most proficient in using non-compete agreements.
In the "Wave Maker" published by the bad reviews, he wrote a story about the "Fairy Child Eight Rebellion".
With the development of the company, a large number of elite talents followed their example and resigned from Fairchild to start their own business, and the departure of this group of people really supported today's Silicon Valley.
I was thinking, if California had supported non-compete agreements at the time, would this Silicon Valley dandelion story end early in "Eight Rebellions"?
These Internet ancestors are precisely because of the "rebellion" that brought the information age to mankind, and now more and more Internet companies are turning around and trying to stifle these "rebellious" genes...
Or to quote what the editorial department of Zhiwei said at that time when it responded to the unreasonable non-compete agreement of the big factory:
Workers should not become some kind of "private property" of the enterprise because they join a certain company and have been "cultivated" by the enterprise, and the non-compete agreement should protect the enterprise and the worker at the same time, rather than a terrifying agreement that the enterprise uses to "eat people".