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I wasn't sure whether there was a thread for this, or if it whether it should go in BFC, so I just brought it here: I had an interview for a contract job with company. They sent me, among other things, a link to a sample contract. I have never been a contract worker as such, and I've never had a contract in the US with a noncompete clause (and the ones I had overseas were a lot less sweeping). So I don't know if this is as insane as it seems to me. Also, I've been out of the US for a long time, and out of the US labor market for considerably longer. I don't have any idea whether things have gotten this bad or not. There are two main WTF parts of this contact. The first is this: quote:2.04. For Contractor’s services, Company agrees to pay Contractor $_____20.00______ per hour So for a 2 hour lesson you get 40 dollars. For a 3 hour lesson, you get 45 dollars. (Well, that's one way to interpret this) Someone wrote this and thought no one would object to it. quote:2. Covenants Not to Compete. Contractor agrees as follows: I think to keep this sufficiently vague for the time being, I won't specify the industry; but this isn't software engineering or anything like that, and the wages involved are not particularly high. (Though if you wanna net detective me...) Furthermore, it is not especially likely that I'll find anything outside this field in the near term. Basically they're asking to own me for the next year and a half, at least. Oh yeah, and: quote:6. Liquidated Damages. Company retains the rights to all customers to whom the and quote:7. Attorney’s Fees. Contractor further agrees that in the event Company finds it reasonably necessary oh, and of course this: quote:3. Non-Disclosure of Terms. Ancillary to the agreement for confidentiality, Contractor agrees to keep It's pretty common for someone to leave and take customers with them in this kind of business, but god drat. I know these things are supposed to be difficult to enforce; but this is the kind of non-compete I'd expect to see for a senior manager getting 7 loving figures, not a drone who'll be lucky to crack five. I'm inclined to tell the guy to suck a dick. I mean, not just the contract, but when I was living in China I wouldn't have gotten out of bed for that little money. But I've been having trouble finding work compatible with school. I'm just wondering if this is as nuts as I think it is. VideoTapir fucked around with this message at 08:22 on Dec 6, 2014 |
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Dec 6, 2014 08:11
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Come back to China.
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Dec 6, 2014 10:42
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The laws vary from state to state. Non-competes are illegal in California, for instance. Many states have restrictions on the duration of the non-compete (usually about 2 years.) It's less common for states to honor work-restriction non-competes as opposed to trade secret non-competes. That non-compete would most likely get thrown out in a lot of states for a variety of reasons. It's a pretty unlikely scenario to ever come up - contracting companies will put all sorts of poo poo in their contracts just to see if it will stick, but they'd still have to a) find out you're working for a competitor, and b) get a lawyer and actually like, sue you in stuff if they somehow found out you broke the non-compete in the remote chance that it's even enforceable. If you really care you can try just asking them to take that section of the contract out (can be accomplished by using a sharpee marker pretty easily) - I probably would just sign it without giving a gently caress though if I REALLY REALLY needed the money.
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Dec 6, 2014 11:38
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I probably wouldn't sign this as-is. I'm just wondering if this is common to even have someone throw this in a contract for a part-time contract job with low pay and no benefits. Is this something that people are generally expected to put up with these days?
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Dec 6, 2014 20:03
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VideoTapir posted:So for a 2 hour lesson you get 40 dollars. For a 3 hour lesson, you get 45 dollars. (Well, that's one way to interpret this) Someone wrote this and thought no one would object to it. Actually, for a 2 hour session, you'd get 30 dollars. It's 20 per hour only if it is less than, not equal to, 2 hours. And I'm interpreting this: quote:Contractor expressly covenants that for a period of five (5) To mean you can't be employed by any business that offers any services to customers the company serves in your city. For example, you couldn't mop their floors or deliver pizzas to them. I'm not a lawyer, but that sounds crazy overly-broad to me, unless there's an assumption that they mean "in the same capacity as this job;" even then, that's not what's in the contract - just that you can't be employed for any job that interacts in any way with the same clients or customers.
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Dec 6, 2014 22:14
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VideoTapir posted:I probably wouldn't sign this as-is. I'm just wondering if this is common to even have someone throw this in a contract for a part-time contract job with low pay and no benefits. Is this something that people are generally expected to put up with these days? Lawyers are expensive and a lot of people will just go on the internet and do DIY contracts/leases/etc. It's unlikely an actual lawyer was involved in the drafting of that contract. Legitimate companies with legal departments, and which also pay real money, may have actual lawyers come up with the contract, but you're probably dealing with someone who used Google as his contract attorney (in which case it's probably easy to negotiate to get rid of the non-compete, dude will probably let you just draw a line through the clause with a sharpee then and there.) The boilerplate is pretty common but it's only really enforced for like corporate executives or people with actual money. The use case for suing is actual valuable employees. A non-compete lawyer might cost $300-$500 an hour - a company isn't spend thousands of dollars trying to sue some dude making $15 an hour on a contract job, especially since the court will almost certainly throw it out.
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Dec 6, 2014 22:17
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Sharkie posted:Actually, for a 2 hour session, you'd get 30 dollars. It's 20 per hour only if it is less than, not equal to, 2 hours. Sorry, I may have made that a little too ambiguous, I edited out a word related to the services, since I wasn't sure what is or isn't public on SA these days. I've decided to say gently caress it, I'd have to be an idiot to work for those assholes. That seems to be the consensus online about them. All I was really wanting to know here is if contracts this lovely are common nowadays. http://gradegetter.com/files/813310770.pdf Here is the contract they sent me. It's a tutoring job. Their information was forwarded by one of my professors, who I am guessing didn't know anything about them other than they had somehow gotten themselves involved with some project with which she was also affiliated. The founder went to one of the same schools as one of her former PhD students, as well, so that might be another connection.
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Dec 6, 2014 22:36
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You seem to know the score, they just don't want you poaching customers. Don't do that, and you'll be fine. If you do, they might sue you, but my guess is that they aren't making a whole lot of profit off of an individual customer at the rates they are paying out to their contractors. Also, if this is 1099, make sure you save 1/3 of that money for taxes. edit: i missed the part where you said gently caress it, good for you.
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Dec 6, 2014 22:53
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adorai posted:You seem to know the score, they just don't want you poaching customers. Don't do that, and you'll be fine. If you do, they might sue you, but my guess is that they aren't making a whole lot of profit off of an individual customer at the rates they are paying out to their contractors. If they aren't, they're doing something wrong. They're charging something like 2-3 times the rate they pay to contractors.
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Dec 6, 2014 23:06
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Is this tutoring? It seems like tutoring.
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Dec 7, 2014 02:10
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Lord Windy posted:Is this tutoring? It seems like tutoring. This happens a lot with tutoring agencies? I talked to another one a while back that wanted a contract signed as part of the application. Uh, no.
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Dec 7, 2014 02:15
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It was something that was put infront of me when I applied to one in Australia. I don't think they spoke to a lawyer, as the contract looked like it was written in America for Americans.
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Dec 7, 2014 02:25
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I have a personal policy that I don't sign things that I don't intend to follow through with, even if they are unenforceable, unlikely to be enforced, etc. If it's on paper, line through all the poo poo you disagree with, initial each one, sign at the bottom, and send it back. There is generally something either at the beginning or at the end saying that you can't line through stuff, that the agreement must stay whole - be sure and line through that part. This is more difficult if it's electronic, as there's no way to do that. Ever since I started reading through contracts and objecting to things in them, I have been surprised at how many places are amenable to changes with little or no pushback. I think 5 years not working in your field in your metropolitan area is wholly unreasonable, I can't see anyone arguing that it's reasonable, and if they do, that's not someone you want to be working for anyhow. If they just want to make sure you're not poaching their clients, agree to write something up where you won't poach their clients.
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Dec 7, 2014 03:22
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That sounds more like a no-poaching clause which isn't too weird. It's just worded too broadly. I guess I would see if they can amend it to specify tutoring services, i.e. change "any business offering services" to "any business offering tutoring services". But I'm guessing they'd tell you to gently caress off because it would cost them money to have their lawyer review it.
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Dec 7, 2014 05:41
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Unenforceable as gently caress, by the way.
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Dec 7, 2014 06:56
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Can you edit the agreement? When ever some jackass sends me an agreement with some bullshit like a Non-Compete clause, I simply remove it and edit the rest to my liking, then sign and return. 99.9% of the time they will never realize that the agreement has been edited as they'll skim through it to look for your signature. Then when they counter sign that, joke's on them for not reviewing their own agreement. I've done this several times for freelance projects as well as the big company/corporate salaried jobs. It's almost pathetic to a degree they don't re-read the agreement when they receive it signed.
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Dec 7, 2014 07:09
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evensevenone posted:That sounds more like a no-poaching clause which isn't too weird. It's just worded too broadly. I guess I would see if they can amend it to specify tutoring services, i.e. change "any business offering services" to "any business offering tutoring services". But I'm guessing they'd tell you to gently caress off because it would cost them money to have their lawyer review it. I edited it in the op because I wasn't sure I wanted to reveal what it was at the time. Regardless of whether it's enforceable or not, what kind of relationship do they expect to establish with their workers if they're putting that kind of language in the contract? They might as well just replace the whole text with "we suck and you do not want to work for us."
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Dec 7, 2014 07:18
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VideoTapir posted:I edited it in the op because I wasn't sure I wanted to reveal what it was at the time. I do contract video work - recently an international megacorp wanted to hire me to shoot some video on an industrial site - the liability waiver they wanted me to sign was only about a page, but it said, basically, that if I did anything that injured anyone, broke anything, or killed anyone, I was wholly responsible and took all legal and financial responsibility; if they, their employees, their equipment, or an act of God broke anything of mine, injured or killed me or any one of my employees, they had no responsibility whatsoever, even if the damage/injury/killing was due to negligence on their part. I also agreed to not sue them for anything, ever. They were seriously flummoxed when I objected to this and refused to sign. Unlike the 10 page contracts where you can line through a few things and most of the agreement stays intact, by the time I got through lining through everything I disagreed with, there was no contract left and my attorney advised me not to sign and return it in that state. I lost the gig, they picked up somebody to do it (who presumably signed the waiver unchanged) the. next. day.
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Dec 8, 2014 06:26
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VideoTapir posted:I edited it in the op because I wasn't sure I wanted to reveal what it was at the time. If they're a lovely company for other reasons, don't go to work for them, but honestly that particular clause looks pretty reasonable, though five years is really long. One year would be more reasonable. That bit about attorney's fees is pretty ridiculous though, I'd probably demand they cut that. The kind of contracts I'd watch out for are the ones that try to ban you from an entire industry or have very broad intellectual property clauses.
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Dec 8, 2014 06:54
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Non-competes are complete bullshit for that level of compensation. They're typically enforced at executive level positions or if you're in a position to reveal a potentially crippling trade secret. It doesn't sound like either one applies to you. I signed a non-compete for my very first full time job and it stated that I couldn't work for anyone else in my industry for a year after I left. Of course they never enforced it because non-competes that prevent you from making a living are not ever going to hold up in court. Send it back if you really need the job and tell them you want the non-compete language removed. It's a contract and it can be revised. But even if you don't want to bother with that a) they will never try to enforce it b) if for some unthinkable reason they did, it would never hold up in a court.
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Dec 8, 2014 09:54
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Heh, they even started having non-competes for sandwich artists. Worked at Subway and want to work for Blimpe? Nope, you have a wait at least a year or you're competing hurting our business. One the things I signed said I couldn't tell employers anything about my job only that my title "Support Enginner" and the dates I was employed. No stories, no specifics of what I actually did, the clients I worked with - absolutely nothing.
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Dec 8, 2014 10:06
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Tab8715 posted:One the things I signed said I couldn't tell employers anything about my job only that my title "Support Enginner" and the dates I was employed. No stories, no specifics of what I actually did, the clients I worked with - absolutely nothing. That's typical of a Non-disclosure agreement (NDA), but nearly impossible to enforce as well.
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Dec 10, 2014 01:25
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We have a similarly crazy seeming non compete but don't enforce it when people move to other companies. However when people start calling up the clients they worked with here and offering to do the same work slightly cheaper, then we enforce it in full. Helps that side of things run a little more smoothly, if we didn't have it there would be very little we could do about ex staff going freelance from their home (with no overhead compared to ours) and being able to drastically undercut us. Our non disclosures are also similar, it's complete blanket coverage - but I talk about what i've done all the time online, I just don't talk about stuff i'm not supposed to and make sure it's all public knowledge in a press release or something. Again this is so if someone isnt quite so careful and the wrong thing gets out to the wrong person the company isnt completely liable and we can fire them easier. cubicle gangster fucked around with this message at 02:59 on Dec 10, 2014 |
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Dec 10, 2014 02:52
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Slayerjerman posted:Can you edit the agreement? How far can you actually get with stuff like this? What if you sneak an extra 0 onto your salary or a nice signing bonus, with a million dollar penalty if they fire you in the first year? Would it actually hold up? Or does it stop working if you overdo it. I hope to do something like this with my next rental agreement (100% damage deposit returned, no penalty for moving out early) but it always seemed like something that wouldn't actually work.
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Dec 10, 2014 08:23
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Dr_Amazing posted:How far can you actually get with stuff like this? What if you sneak an extra 0 onto your salary or a nice signing bonus, with a million dollar penalty if they fire you in the first year? Would it actually hold up? Or does it stop working if you overdo it. I think it's more that you can just black out sections, adding things usually means the contract should be rewritten.
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Dec 10, 2014 16:54
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Dr_Amazing posted:How far can you actually get with stuff like this? What if you sneak an extra 0 onto your salary or a nice signing bonus, with a million dollar penalty if they fire you in the first year? Would it actually hold up? Or does it stop working if you overdo it. No penalty for moving out early would largely negate the entire purpose of a lease. Neither of these things seem advisable to "sneak" into your lease. But IANAL.
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Dec 10, 2014 19:49
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Both parties really should initial any changes just to be safe. Beyond that I'm guessing you are at the mercy of lawyers / judges.
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Dec 10, 2014 20:44
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