Location: North Carolina
I’m a dog groomer and my coworker quit last week and redirected a client to the company when they texted her about an appointment. Worried, my boss made a contract for me to sign stating that 24 months after termination or quitting i may not solicit clients for services as well as they may not pursue me. They will seek $5,000 in damages per offense, essentially it is a non compete. It feels like an intimidation tactic and I don’t wish to sign it. My boss personally targets me enough as it is.
Comments
You don’t have to sign it. Your boss does not have to continue to employ you.
Don’t sign.
Tell them I am not signing, fire me if you want. I will go home and start calling clients.
Keep in mind that if you do sign, even if don’t violate the agreement – you can be sued over an allegation you’ve violated the agreement. It won’t matter if you haven’t, that gets decided in court.
Can you afford an attorney on an hourly rate? If no then signing the contract is also a major financial risk.
It is a hell of a lot easier to tell someone to get lost in court, faster and cheaper, and get attorney costs, when you haven’t signed due to being frivolous. If you sign, it won’t be even if the agreement is later declared unconscionable or not violated.
No, it is not violating your rights unless you are currently on a bona fide contract with employment terms. The vast majority of workers in the US don’t have that kind of employment contract though.
If you are a typical at-will employee they can make a non compete part of employment requirements moving forward.
Now, your employer actually enforcing the non-compete might be another issue altogether. North Carolina courts haven’t traditionally been friendily disposed toward non-competes. Not only is 2 years quite possibly beyond what could be considered a reasonable time-frame of restricting you, in NC if an employer wants to have a current employee sign a non-compete the courts don’t tend to consider “you get to keep your job” as proper consideration to meet a basic contract element. They want to see “valuable consideration” if it’s changing an already established employer-employeee relationship, and generally want to see it as part of an overall employment contract, not a stand alone agreement. If your boss offers you a bonus for signing, or a raise moving forward for signing, that strengthens their chance of enforcing it.
The court will sometimes step in and actually rework the terms rather than dismiss outright, so they might reduce the 24 months to 12 and hold up the 12.
Not sure if anyone can point to any really recent case law in NC that I might be unaware of where judicial attitude has shifted regarding non-competes in the state, please do if you know of it. As far as I know, it’s still a state where non-competes are generally frowned upon unless they meet a pretty strict set of criteria.
>sign a contract or face termination
A different way to say that is “sign a contract in exchange for continued employment”.
Because your employer isn’t offering you an initial hiring, a raise, a bonus, or a promotion in exchange for the non-compete agreement, the agreement will not be enforceable.
It might also not be enforceable if your employment is terminated involuntarily.
>I don’t wish to sign it
You aren’t required to. I wouldn’t.
Terminating your employment because you won’t sign the non-compete agreement is likely not unlawful, even if the agreement is later scrutinized by a court and found to be un-enforceable.