Noncompete agreements, originally intended to keep skilled workers from bringing trade secrets from their employer to a competitor, are starting to show up in low-wage work. Companies are realizing that even where no significant trade secrets are at stake, they can keep workers from looking for other jobs by making them sign agreements putting many available jobs off limits. And Amazon is
taking this logic to the extreme by making warehouse workers—even temporary ones—sign strict noncompete agreements:
The Amazon contract, obtained by The Verge, requires employees to promise that they will not work at any company where they "directly or indirectly" support any good or service that competes with those they helped support at Amazon, for a year and a half after their brief stints at Amazon end. Of course, the company’s warehouses are the beating heart of Amazon’s online shopping empire, the extraordinary breadth of which has earned it the title of "the Everything Store," so Amazon appears to be requiring temp workers to foreswear a sizable portion of the global economy in exchange for a several-months-long hourly warehouse gig. [...]
Starr, who reviewed the Amazon agreement, said that while attorneys may differ in their interpretations on which services count as having been "supported" by a warehouse employee, the 18-month duration seems "incredibly long," especially for a temporary job. In the case of a stint lasting three months, the restrictions would stretch six times longer than the actual length of employment, Starr noted in an email. "A restriction like this could only be credible if the type of information the individual learned in a short time could be very damaging to the firms."
This is even more extreme than the
Jimmy John's noncompete agreements barring workers from getting jobs at basically anywhere else that sells sandwiches.
In many states, such agreements aren't enforceable. But if workers don't know that, it might be enough to scare them away from leaving a job where they've signed a noncompete in order to get a better job somewhere else.