Unreported News on the Non-Compete

Non-compete clauses got out of hand. Once a reign on executives and professional employees, many lower-wage employers have been telling their employees that they can't leave their job for another in the same field. Nursing assistants, fast food workers, and janitors are some of the employees who have recently found themselves sigining such agreements. However, these are not common in the shipboard side of the maritime sector. Since the Seaman's Act of 1915, as lobbied for by Andrew Furuseth, the American seafarer was permitted to "break articles" in any US Port. While I have not found an explicit requirement to allow seafarers to choose a different employer, it is certainly implicit in the culture surrounding seafaring, where employee's ties to a company are weak, and ties to a union and job hall being strong. To be fair, the system of impressement that existed prior to 1915 (and that still exists globally) was replaced eventually by strong unions and a "closed shop" hiring system for ocean-going, unionized ships. Within this system, there is mobility between different companies and different types of ship (one could be on a car carrier one voyage, and on a grain ship the next). However, as written by John Konrad from GCaptain, maritime wages have stagnated under the closed shop system, where unions would compete against each other to sign a contract favorable to the employer. A new generation of union leaders, who labored under these conditions, agreed to allow some healthy competition through a mechanism known as a passthrough agreement. This would incentivize shipping companies to sign more generous contracts, as poorly-paying ships would be unable to find crewmembers. Reducing the barriers to personal economic competitiveness is working in the maritime sector. How about the rest of the nation? California became a leader in tech and other innovation due to its longstanding, strong prohibition on non-compete clauses. Predominately in the near-South and the West, state legislatures and courts have invalidated many classes of non-compete clauses, and to do so through nationally through the Federal Trade Commission would follow a winning trend.