How About Not Selling Out for Campaign Donations

A bill eliminating non-compete agreements has passed the New York state legislature, but Gov. Kathy Hochul wants to water it down, claiming that it would make New York less competitive.

I would suggest that she look at California which has banned non-compete agreements since 1878 (Or just google the Traitorous Eight).

It could be argued that with strong non-compete agreements, the move of the electronics industry from the East to the California Bay Area would never have occurred.

Of course, Hochul does not really know enough to care about the competitive consequences of the law, she just knows that big finance and big law are major campaign donors, so she is trying to gut the law:

The clock is ticking on just over 100 bills that Gov. Kathy Hochul has to decide to sign or kill before the end of the year.

One bill sitting on her desk would ban businesses from forcing employees to sign non-compete clauses, which businesses argue protects company secrets should a worker jump ship to a competitor.

New York courts have previously ruled in certain cases that non-compete clauses are tough to enforce, but those in the financial, law and tech sectors are fighting to keep them in place.

The governor said she wants to meet on middle ground: announcing she’d prefer to keep a non-compete ban in place for employees making over $250,000.

“The other thing I have to balance is making sure that we don’t drive businesses from our state because there isn’t a competitive environment,” said Hochul during an unrelated press event in Lower Manhattan Thursday.

The override of a governor's veto in New York is exceedingly rare, so if she were to veto the bill, it would almost certainly stand.

It should be noted that near New York City, particularly in law and finance, $¼ million a year is a pretty low level employee, so this would have the effect of excluding very large portions of the workforce, particularly among finance and big law, from its protections.

She is better than Andrew Cuomo, who took aggressive actions to ensure that Republicans kept control of the State Senate, but that is an exceedingly low bar.