My favourite (mostly because I know the details and personally trust the source) was for a cashier position in a small grocery store in a small city. When the applicant tried to negotiate on the terms, they were told that someone could just walk away with their supplier information. While it may have been a legitimate grievance, it was a poor excuse to harm someone's future employment prospects. (Small city == limited choice.)

I wonder whether non-competes for unskilled labour is an American thing? I only ever heard about it in an American context.

It seems a bit silly to me, as it seems to cost the employee more than the benefit the employer receives from that clause.

(Though the real benefit to the employer might be in decreasing the employees outside options, thus allowing better control.

I wonder how one might test that theory.)

> It seems a bit silly to me, as it seems to cost the employee more than the benefit the employer receives from that clause.

Are you surprised employers can exploit unskilled laborers? It's not silly. It's asymmetrical power resulting in exploitation of people who don't have many options in jobs they can find.

> For the unskilled labourer, it doesn't matter much whether they work for Burger King or McDonald's.

It also doesn't matter for those companies which cashier out of the 100s of applicants they hire. Your only power as an employee is the power to quit and if you can't guarantee that you'll get a new job quickly enough, you're powerless.

Your other power is to not start in the first place.

Employers with better reputation have an easier job both hiring and retaining.

Treating people unnecessarily badly leads to a worse reputation.

You’re assuming a extremely tight labor market, which may be true since about a year ago, but definitely has not been true for at least a decade before that.

Before the current tight labor market, if someone who was living paycheck to paycheck found themself unemployed, they took whatever job they could get. Maybe they apply for 10 jobs and only hear back from 1 for an interview. They have hungry children to feed and don’t have any money for groceries. The employer understands that most applicants are desperate for any job so can tack on any terms they want - such as a non-compete.

Here is Wikipedia article on non compete clauses. Seems like they are quite common everywhere with various restrictions. Amazingly North Dakota and Oklahoma also have a total ban in non-completes along with California.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-compete_clause

Thanks for the link. Though I can only tell that non-compete exist at all in these countries, not whether they are prevalent for unskilled labour.

Here is an example from a sandwich shop: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-jimmyjohns-settlement-idU...

FWIW that was only intended for store managers, who are (or at least were) flown to Champagne, IL for multiple weeks of training.

Having worked at JJ’s, I don’t think they were taught anything remotely with a non-compete. I think they just didn’t want somebody becoming a manager and then using that to get a better job across the street. Training employees is expensive.

But that was their rationale, anyway.

Always good to hear all perspectives on a story.

>FWIW that was only intended for store managers

Do you mean intended for store manager and applied to store managers only, or intended for store managers and applied to everyone (because template/boilerplate [0])? This press release [1] states it covered positions more junior than store manager.

As an aside: interested if anyone knows what is meant by copyright in the press release above:

>Madigan’s suit alleges the companies required all employees to sign a non-compete agreement, which the company claims is covered by copyright, as a condition of employment.

[0] I experienced this. Would recommend to anyone to at least question any condition you don't like, even if you aren't able to negotiate. I was taking a low-level position at a large organisation so I had no real leverage and had a condition crossed off because it was meant for full-time and fixed-term employees but somehow made it into my casual contract, presumably because it was part of some boilerplate.

[1] https://www.illinoisattorneygeneral.gov/pressroom/2016_06/20...

> Do you mean intended for store manager and applied to store managers only, or intended for store managers and applied to everyone (because template/boilerplate [0])?

The latter. My guess is that (for non-managers) it was boilerplate and nobody either noticed or cared enough to remove it. It's not surprising—lots of weird, sometimes contradictory stuff ends up in contracts.

I could _maybe_ see them trying to enforce it on a store or district manager if the manager decided to split immediately after being flown out to Illinois, or something. But I recall multiple managers leaving to go work at other fast food places—some even on bad terms—and nobody was ever sued. One manager even stole large sums of money and they basically said, "Oh well."

JJ's likes to pretend it's a fancy QSR, but it's all bark. You have to learn the menu and pass a test before you can get hired, but in reality you can bomb the test and still get hired. They have a strict dress code, but it's only enforced when corporate comes to do its yearly reviews. I don't see them caring enough to ever go through the effort of suing an employee for a non-compete.

But it's been 10 years since I worked there, so perhaps things have changed.

I signed one as an intern.