How Non-Competes Shackle Workers To Dead-End Jobs

“You can’t work for anyone who competes with Amazon for the next 18 months.”

You’ve heard about the Great Resignation, the legions of American workers who have reached a breaking point with their abusive, underpaid jobs and jumped ship. It’s a remarkable, spontaneous, uncoordinated uprising that sees Alice quitting her job and Bob quitting his, and then Alice getting Bob’s old job at a better wage, and Bob getting Alice’s old job at a better wage, too. After 40 years of wage stagnation, workers are finally starting to claim back some of the share of the profits that had been diverted from people who do things to people who own things.

But as great as the Great Resignation is, it could be greater. Many workers who would like to switch jobs can’t, because they are bound by “non-compete agreements” that ban them from working for rival companies. Noncompete agreements are a way to make sure that bad companies can retain good workers. Wherever we find noncompetes, we find sluggish economies dominated by incompetent and malicious firms. California’s tech sector only exists today because the state constitution bans noncompetes. Without that ban, the industry would have died in its cradle, strangled by the founder of the first microchip company, a brooding paranoiac who devoted his life to…