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Job hopping helped Silicon Valley thrive. Why do other states restrict it?

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Re: Job hopping helped Silicon Valley thrive. Why do other states restrict it?

#41

Post by timroy »

_delirium wrote: post #18

The headline kind of has the valence of government activity backwards, though I agree with its policy proposal. Other states don't restrict job-hopping, they just stand by and don't interfere as the free market ends up having the effect of restricting job-hopping. Employees end up signing restrictive employment contracts, and states don't prohibit them from doing so. California has made a conscious decision that the…

Contract enforcement is a government activity, though. To enforce a contract, you ask the government (via the courts) to force the other party to give you assets, or not to work somewhere, etc.

By the same reasoning, if I sue you for defamation for calling me a lamebrained chucklehead, courts refuse to entertain the suit because the government won't restrict free speech. You're entitled to express your opinion, and the government won't assist me in suppressing your speech.

In many states, the government is happy to assist employers in restricting job-hopping.

I take your point that this government activity has its immediate catalyst in private actions in the free market, and that's different in important ways from other government activity. But still.

Re: Job hopping helped Silicon Valley thrive. Why do other states restrict it?

#42

Post by _delirium »

nitwit005 wrote: post #33
_delirium wrote: post #18

The headline kind of has the valence of government activity backwards, though I agree with its policy proposal. Other states don't restrict job-hopping, they just stand by and don't interfere as the free market ends up having the effect of restricting job-hopping. Employees end up signing restrictive employment contracts, and states don't prohibit them from doing so. California has made a conscious decision that the…

Enforcement of contracts is always government intervention. It's a regulation of business, forcing people to stick to their word on certain issues, despite obvious economic reasons not to. Not enforcing some contracts is less intervention, not more.

True, I agree that contract law's existence in the first place depends on government enforcement. The same could be said for property ownership, at least state-enforced legal forms of property rather than direct possession (e.g. absentee land ownership proved via deeds and land registries, and enforced via trespassing law).

Within the context of the U.S.'s current economic/legal system, I think it's more in accordance with common usage to think of the existence of private property and contract law as being the basic substrate on which everything else happens, including more specific government action. For example, to continue with the property analogy, we typically think of eminent domain as a state "taking" property, even in cases where a person's "ownership" of a property depends on the government in the first place (someone owns a deed to land they don't actively reside on or use, but since it's legally recognized as property, the government choosing to build something on it is legally recognized as a taking of property). But point taken that this whole contract/property system is itself created and enforced by the state, not some kind of naturally occurring phenomenon.

Re: Job hopping helped Silicon Valley thrive. Why do other states restrict it?

#43

Post by oconnor663 »

timroy wrote: post #41
_delirium wrote: post #18

The headline kind of has the valence of government activity backwards, though I agree with its policy proposal. Other states don't restrict job-hopping, they just stand by and don't interfere as the free market ends up having the effect of restricting job-hopping. Employees end up signing restrictive employment contracts, and states don't prohibit them from doing so. California has made a conscious decision that the…

Contract enforcement is a government activity, though. To enforce a contract, you ask the government (via the courts) to force the other party to give you assets, or not to work somewhere, etc. By the same reasoning, if I sue you for defamation for calling me a lamebrained chucklehead, courts refuse to entertain the suit because the government won't restrict free speech. You're entitled to express your opinion, and t…

Consent on both sides is an important difference. It's not everything, but maybe important enough that it's misleading to talk around it.

Re: Job hopping helped Silicon Valley thrive. Why do other states restrict it?

#44

Post by timroy »

timroy wrote: post #41
_delirium wrote: post #18

The headline kind of has the valence of government activity backwards, though I agree with its policy proposal. Other states don't restrict job-hopping, they just stand by and don't interfere as the free market ends up having the effect of restricting job-hopping. Employees end up signing restrictive employment contracts, and states don't prohibit them from doing so. California has made a conscious decision that the…

Contract enforcement is a government activity, though. To enforce a contract, you ask the government (via the courts) to force the other party to give you assets, or not to work somewhere, etc. By the same reasoning, if I sue you for defamation for calling me a lamebrained chucklehead, courts refuse to entertain the suit because the government won't restrict free speech. You're entitled to express your opinion, and t…

Just saw your reply below, so I'll just pretend you've posted the same reply here. ;-)

Re: Job hopping helped Silicon Valley thrive. Why do other states restrict it?

#45

Post by Jemaclus »

What would happen if an employer in Massachusetts offered me a job and asked me to sign a non-compete clause, and I said I wouldn't take the job if I had to sign a non-compete? Do you think they would back down? Or do you think they would say "too bad" and withdraw the offer?

My gut says that most of the time, they'll back down and take that off the table. But I guess it depends on whether you have a huge legal team backing you up...

Personally, I'm not in the habit of signing my rights away in return for a paycheck. I'll look around for another job, thankyouverymuch.

Re: Job hopping helped Silicon Valley thrive. Why do other states restrict it?

#46

Post by mankash666 »

In an era of outsourcing and globalization, gig-economy and minimum wages that don't guarantee a living above the poverty line, it is stunning what politicians will do for support from rich lobby groups ( read corporations). About time the federal government intervened and banned what amounts to a non-free market for job seekers.

Re: Job hopping helped Silicon Valley thrive. Why do other states restrict it?

#47

Post by oautholaf »

_delirium wrote: post #42
nitwit005 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enforcement of contracts is always government intervention. It's a regulation of business, forcing people to stick to their word on certain issues, despite obvious economic reasons not to. Not enforcing some contracts is less intervention, not more.

True, I agree that contract law's existence in the first place depends on government enforcement. The same could be said for property ownership, at least state-enforced legal forms of property rather than direct possession (e.g. absentee land ownership proved via deeds and land registries, and enforced via trespassing law). Within the context of the U.S.'s current economic/legal system, I think it's more in accordanc…

> Within the context of the U.S.'s current economic/legal system, I think it's more in accordance with common usage to think of the existence of private property and contract law as being the basic substrate on which everything else happens

This may have been common usage through the 1920s, and it may be common usage for people who wish the New Deal never happened. But even then it would be a stretch. This country's legal history is a lot more nuanced than that. What you articulate is probably best described as a minority vision today.

Re: Job hopping helped Silicon Valley thrive. Why do other states restrict it?

#48

Post by _delirium »

oautholaf wrote: post #47
_delirium wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, I agree that contract law's existence in the first place depends on government enforcement. The same could be said for property ownership, at least state-enforced legal forms of property rather than direct possession (e.g. absentee land ownership proved via deeds and land registries, and enforced via trespassing law). Within the context of the U.S.'s current economic/legal system, I think it's more in accordanc…

> Within the context of the U.S.'s current economic/legal system, I think it's more in accordance with common usage to think of the existence of private property and contract law as being the basic substrate on which everything else happens This may have been common usage through the 1920s, and it may be common usage for people who wish the New Deal never happened. But even then it would be a stretch. This country's…

My reading of New Deal legal history (though I'm admittedly an amateur reader of it) is that it came closer to endorsing that view than rejecting it. There was a turn towards courts being open to social-democratic style regulation of businesses and contracts, whereas previously some had held that a strong "freedom of contract" prohibited interference with most contracts between private parties. But courts didn't challenge the default existence of property and contracts as the substrate over which regulation happened. They simply held that the state had the authority to regulate them in a number of cases. And it was described in those terms, as regulation, which tends to imply that it's restricting something that preexists the regulation.

An alternate, more radical view would be that, since the state had created contract law, property law, etc. in the first place, many New Deal laws weren't even regulations or restrictions on anything, merely the state choosing to withdraw some kinds of legal arrangements that it had previously created. But I don't think any New Deal courts were nearly that radical. They instead agreed that they were regulations or restrictions, but held that those regulations/restrictions were within the government's powers to enact, most often justifying them as within the power the Constitution gives Congress to regulate interstate commerce.

Re: Job hopping helped Silicon Valley thrive. Why do other states restrict it?

#49

Post by force_reboot »

eru wrote: post #17

> The best argument against noncompetes is about freedom > [...] there should be a presumption in favor of preserving people's freedom to join a new company or start one of their own. Alas, as nice as it is to cloth an issue we care about in the language of moral superiority, banning noncompete agreements does in fact impact the freedom of contract. (In the same way, but to a lesser extent, than the ban on being able…

Agreed, these laws are more like anti-trust laws. Free market economics, according to its primary academic proponents (academic economists) is not the same as, nor is it even consistent with, the government enforcing arbitrary contracts.

Re: Job hopping helped Silicon Valley thrive. Why do other states restrict it?

#50

Post by stale2002 »

grahamburger wrote: post #30
stale2002 wrote: post #11

Here is the thing about non-competes. If you are smart about it, they can be basically impossible to enforce. If you've signed a non-compete and jump ship, you can simply NOT tell your old employer that you got a new job. What are they going to do? Sue you for working at a company they don't know about? There is nothing they can do if you are subtle.

At the last few places I've worked I've found that all I had to do was smile as they handed me the non-compete and tell them that I would take it home, read it and return it signed. Then I'd take it home and trash it. The next time someone asks about it (usually every few months) I say "I'm sorry, I think I lost it, could you email it to me again?" and start the process over. I honestly hate to be that passive aggres…

That's really good advice! I'm going to use this one for sure.
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