Non-Compete agreements have tripled since 2000 and there is very little the employee can do about it – PB/TK
‘I’m ruined’: Workers realize too late that they signed away the right to other jobs – By Conor Dougherty / May 16 2017
Keith Bollinger’s paycheck as a factory manager had shriveled after the 2008 financial crisis, but then he got a chance to pull himself out of recession’s hole. A rival textile company offered him a better job – and a big raise.
When he said yes, it set off a three-year legal battle that concluded last week but wiped out his savings along the way.
“I tried to get a better life for my wife and my son, and it backfired,” said Bollinger, 53, of Conover, 45 miles northwest of Charlotte, N.C. “Now I’m in my mid-50s, and I’m ruined.”
Bollinger had signed a noncompete agreement, designed to prevent him from leaving his previous employer for a competitor. These contracts have long been routine among senior executives. But they are rapidly spreading to employees like Bollinger, who do the kind of blue-collar work that President Donald Trump has promised to create more of.
The growth of noncompete agreements is part of a broad shift in which companies assert ownership over work experience as well as work. A recent survey by economists including Evan Starr, a management professor at the University of Maryland, showed that about one in five employees was bound by a noncompete clause in 2014.
Employment lawyers say their use has exploded. Russell Beck, a partner at the Boston law firm Beck Reed Riden who does an annual survey of noncompete litigation, said the most recent data showed that noncompete and trade-secret lawsuits had roughly tripled since 2000.
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