Congress Should Ban Noncompete Clauses
By 
Evidently, the labor agenda of the next sane Congress is going to be very crowded. But something that should be on it has a national ban on noncompete clauses. This story provides many excellent illustrations of why:
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 this past 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 Mr. Bollinger, who is 53. “Now I’m in my mid-50s, and I’m ruined.”
Mr. 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 Mr. Bollinger, who do the kind of blue-collar work that President Trump has promised to create more of.
To the extent that there are legitimate reasons for noncompete clauses, they can be addressed with narrower provisions about trade secrets. But as the article makes clear, in many or most cases intellectual property concerns are just a pretext, in the way that “competitive balance” is used to justify suppressing salaries in professional sports. (Bonus points when people defend salary caps by defending the legendary competitive balance of the National Chalk Association.) The spread of non-compete clauses makes clear that businesses (and their political patrons) don’t favor “markets” per se — if employees gain leverage they’re happy to suppress markets however they can.
Admittedly, California has banned noncompete clauses and the tech industry has completely vanis…I’ll come in again.