[ale] VOTING ALERT: Protect Your Freedom to Work!

[Lightner, Jeff]

I saw a story about this on the news.   Supposedly the reason this
amendment is "needed" is because under current law if any clause of a
non-compete agreement is found to be invalid then the entire agreement
is invalid.   The idea being that the law would be changed to say that
one invalid clause would not invalidate the entire agreement.

I'm against the amendment because it is way too vague.   While the above
may or may not be the reason it was put on the ballot the fact is that
there is nothing in the amendment as written that limits it to the
above.   Even if it did limit to the above I'm not sure I'd vote for it.
People that try to put things in agreements that aren't valid should pay
the price.

-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Tim
Watts
Sent: Tuesday, November 02, 2010 12:03 PM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] VOTING ALERT: Protect Your Freedom to Work!

On Tue, 2010-11-02 at 10:21 -0400, Mark Wright wrote:
> 
> 2.  I think it may be a good thing.  This amendment fixes a problem
> that the government has encountered doing business.   It may sound
> like they just want the power to over pay companies owned by relatives
> but that really is pretty hard to get away with unless you are the
> mayor.  What they want is the freedom to continue to do business with
> companies that are giving us good service. This amendment will allow
> the government to do business with companies that have non compete
> clauses in their contracts.
> "Businesses desire non compete clauses in contracts to guarantee that
> former employees, and business associates with specialized knowledge
> of trade secrets are not able to leave and create their own companies
> using their intellectual property.  This proposal gives a judge the
> unilateral ability to "blue-pencil" or limit the duration, geographic
> area and scope of prohibited activities provided in a contract or
> agreement restricting or regulating competitive activities."
> It does not limit other oversight.  
> 
Businesses can and do have non-compete clauses in GA. Currently, they
have to make a good faith effort to make them reasonable in terms of
time limits, scope, geography etc. or risk having it invalidated. What
this amendment does is remove all motivation on the employer's part to
be reasonable and thus throw additional legal hurdles in the way for
startups and innovation.

I think it's quite telling when you look at the ballot verbiage of
Amendment 1 and the actual changes it would bring compared with the
other amendments. All the other amendments pretty much use the language
of the proposed changes; amendment 1 does not. They could have worded it
like "Should the constitution be amended to allow judges to modify
certain non-competitive agreements". BTW, they've already passed a law
that implements this -- they're just waiting on the amendment to pass so
it can go into effect.

Please vote NO on #1, it's important!

Aaron, I would caution you on your rhetoric. I normally don't mind your
rants; I've developed a kind of auto-translate to extract the spirit of
them. But, as others have said, your post did nothing to help the cause.
Thankfully, this issue's pretty much a no-brainer but a dicier one could
have really blown it. You're a smart guy addressing a smart audience; if
you can't compose a rational argument to support something important
like this get someone else to do it.



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