As an HR professional, I am generally not in favor of non compete agreements. In fact, I think noncompete agreements are a pretty good indicator of the culture and climate of the company you work for. The more restrictive the agreement, the farther away from that company I would want to get.
Here’s a novel idea……. How about businesses work on providing an appropriate culture, opportunities, and benefits so that their employees don’t wanna leave to go work for the competition?
There ARE some instances where non competes are legit. Someone mentioned tradesmen - you spend 2 years training them, they get experience, and then they can totally undercut you and start their own biz. That's a real issue for small biz, its not just Conglomo-Corp hosing the little guy. Ironically, I bet vast majority of NCs are done by big corps, and not small biz.
In my business, you train sales people, they make personal relationships with customers, and if they jump you can lose a big customer. Heck, they can even jump in advance of a big deal, and take it with them to jump start their own company. We worry about it a lot, but we pay good commissions so money isn't a driver. But if one of them wanted to start his own company, we are training & supporting our competition. We don't do NC's and have never thought about it. Though others in our industry absolutely do them (never heard of one enforced though).
All that said, I'd guess at least 80% of existing NCs are not legit. 100% agree with you that the worst companies do these the most - Honeywell is notorious for hitting almost everyone with them, AND trying to enforce them! My experience is that most companies that have them, its more of a "well its the thought that counts" to scare people - they would never actually go to court to enforce.
200% agree with you about culture and opportunities etc being the real key. People leaving is much less about money than it is bad managers, no real advancement chances, crappy environment. To the extent that this sharpens management minds about doing better by their employees to keep them on board, that's a good thing. I won't hold my breath though.
Second topic - what about with company buy outs? When you sell a small biz, they often put a noncompete on the former owner so he doesn't just hire key people away and start over. Is that still ok?