These employers are now requesting that I sign a non-compete document. Is this legal and do I need to sign it? They are choosing to withhold wages that are owed to me if I do not sign the requested document, even though I have terminated employment with them.

Thank you.

So my question is without any real job offer, is the non compete agreement valid? There is no start date of employment on the agreement. Meanwhile another recruiting company is ready to place me with the client B. Is it legally permissible to join the client B through another recruiting company.

I have never been employed by this company A before and I dont have any job offers from them. But they made me sign the agreement saying its just a usual procedure before submitting me to the client. Also in the agreement whenever it specifies me, it says as a consultant. It doesn’t use the word employee. So am I bound to this agreement as an individual consultant even though I am not an employee of that company.
Thanks in advance.

Why didn’t they give you the NCA when they hired you? Seems pretty odd to me that just 4 months later they hit you with this.

My advice: Have an attorney review it and advise you. Use that to buy you some time. If they’re gonna spring this so suddenly, they should undestand that you need time to consult a lawyer. If they say “it’s no big deal” then I’d smile and say, “so why are we doing this?”

After leaving the company three years later I was offered a job at a competitor. My former employer sent me a threatening letter, which I took, along with the NCA to a sharp employment lawyer. He advised me to take heed as the arbitration would occur in a small town where the CEO had lived his whole life and was pals with the judge.

End result: the new employer withdrew my job offer, saying he didn’t want to play hardball with the former employer. This was four months ago.

As for me, I’m having a difficult time finding a new job. Being 61 makes it tough. Morale: heed the advice of this thread and be smart.

I wonder how it would work, when offered a new job with a non-compete, to offer “I’m still consulting my lawyer” or “Can we schedule a meeting with my lawyer and the company’s lawyer” for a while. How many companies would eventually give up and how many would refuse to hire?

Thus I’m inspired to give a related contract signing story.

My divorce attorney had buried in their representation contract a clause that allowed them to AUTOMATICALLY bill your credit card for outstanding balances.

This would potentially cause issues for many reasons so I simply lined out the offending sentence in that section, returned it to the secretary and kept my mouth shut.

As you would imagine, there was a billing dispute that the attorney refused to be fair about.

So…imagine their surprise when they discovered that any attempts to bully me by unilaterally charging my card would be FRAUD!

So I agree with many comments above. Read the NCA, bring up questions, attempt to negotiate and “walk” if you’re being taken advantage of.

I interviewed with ContractCo and GiantCo and they liked me. Then I got the employment agreement from ContractCo. It had a very strict non-compete clause. For 1 year after my contract ended, I could not work for GiantCo or (get this) any other company at which ContractCo had placed employees. They would not provide me with a list of those companies, but from their web site it seemed that they placed employees at most of the large employers in this area. And this was a 3-month contract.

There was also a No Solicitation clause that, if I read it correctly, forbade me from having any contact with any employee at GiantCo for 1 year after my contract ended.

There was a clause stating that any litigation to enforce the agreement had to take place in ContractCo’s home state.

There was a special provision for those of you who would sign the agreement thinking it is unenforceable. The agreement had a clause stating that you think the agreement is “fair” or somesuch. It would be hard to go to court then and argue that you think the agreement is unfair.

Both the offer letter and the agreement stated that the agreement superseded any previous written or oral agreements. So everything the recruiter told me over the phone was, to put it charitably, insignificant.

I asked that the questionable parts of the agreement be changed to match what the recruiter said in the phone calls. The only thing he would change would be to change the 1-year period to 3 months.

I declined the job offer. The recruiter asked me why. I told him it was because of the agreement.

I’ve had candidates work with my clients to revise NCA’s. The more quietly you do it, the more likely to get it done. What employers worry about is word getting out that they revised the NCA for one person. That would lead to requests for changes by employees.

I’m an example of someone who refused to sign an NCA while I was an employee of a company. My employer was acquired by a bigger company. HR demanded that all managers sign an NCA. Mind you, these were people who ALREADY were employees. I ignored it each time it arrived in inter-office mail. (E-mail was nascent then.) Finally I started getting calls from HR wanting to know when I was going to sign it. I kept telling them my lawyer was still reviewing it. Would the company’s lawyer have time to discuss it with my lawyer? Now we were talking legal fees for the company. Managers around me told me I’d get fired. They were stunned. I never signed it, no matter how many times HR asked. What were they going to do, fire me? I suppose they could have. A year or so later I quit because the company was so poorly managed.

I have never signed any kind of NCA. I never will. The answer to an NCA is to request that the company sign a severance package that compensates you for lost income due to the restriction the NCA imposes. That’s only fair. I won’t compete with you, but you have to pay me to stay out of your market, okay?