Morale at work has been super low for the past few years, ever since the CEO/President bragged about how well they did in 2021 “record profits, over and beyond anything we ever expected” and 2022 “we barely made more than we did last year”, but none of that success trickled down to the people responsible for that success. I’m surrounded by people actively looking for work elsewhere. So, to keep people from quitting, the company forced everyone to sign the agreement in the Imgur link I’ve attached. Of course it gives all power to the company, and of course we had to sign it under penalty of losing our jobs immediately.

This of course is in addition to Top Management blaming the Bottom Management for the morale issue, and rebranding poor morale as an “engagement issue”. They’re also forcing the workers to come up with solutions for the “engagement issue”, going so far as to put it on our annual reviews. Part of our “goals for the upcoming year” is to deal with “low engagement”. That’s right, if we don’t come up with solutions for our own morale problem, it will look poorly on our reviews.

I have worked for some brain-dead companies before, but I’ve never seen such myopia in Leadership. At least previously I knew I was getting fucked on purpose. Right now I’m not sure if it’s an accident.

  • @Aceticon
    1•9 months ago

    The no cost for the employer thing is because the employee will likely refrain from taking certain offers after they leave, because they’re concerned about the costs of being sued and the possibility of losing the case because they could have found “gainful employment” (just not that specific offer) - as you described, it seems to imply that the ex-employee, having signed a non-compete does legally have to refrain from taking certain job offers unless they literally have no other choice.

    The mere risk of being sued and losing the case leads the ex-employer to refrain from taking certain jobs, providing the ex-employee with benefits (such as denying certain expert resources to competing companies) at no cost.

    When the law is crystal clear that non-competes are only valid if paid for, there is no such threat hanging over the ex-employee (as not only would the ex-employer see its case summary thrown out if they took it to court, they would actually pay all the legal costs of the ex-employee) hence the ex-employee has zero pressure in their choice of future employeers.

    It’s the difference between a non-compete being a genuine risk for an ex-employee if broken versus being no risk whatsoever (literally worth less than the paper its written on).

    That said I totally agree that when one is in a position to do so (which by now I personally am), just refuse to sign the non-compete. This is however rarelly the case for the more junior types or when the market is bad (such as my case below which happenned just after the first Tech crash).

    (Mind you, I was once pushed to sign one with an “or else we will withdraw our job offer” threat - just after the first Tech crash in 2000, so I would be hard pressed to find anything else before running out of savings if I didn’t took that job - and I pretty much started looking for another job from day 1 there, without them even having an hint of that was going on, taking my time and being chosy, and 11 months later, after having become pretty essential to the team, I had something much better and just dumped them with the explanation that “You chose to make it an adversarial relationship from the start, so I’m leaving now that I have the kind of offer I prefer and don’t really care about what my leaving with the minimum notice will do to your projects”. Funny enough I later found that in that country non-competes were worthless if not paid, so all that shit they pulled was useless and created a situation which was ultimatelly a net loss for them).