The Michigan Telephone blog

There are days (like, most of the time) when I really hate living in Michigan, not because of the climate or the people or anything like that, but because our lawmakers are the most f**ked up bunch of legislators in the entire civilized world, or at least they come off that way.  The problem is that they’ll make a law favoring any corporation or special interest group that comes along, as long as said entity throws enough money into their re-election fund (directly or indirectly), and beyond that they are too damn lazy to really understand the laws they are passing (at least that’s my theory; the alternative would be to think they just don’t give a damn about the people they are supposed to represent). Thus we are stuck with travesties such as compulsory no-fault auto insurance, which makes our car insurance rates higher than just about anyplace else in the nation. Anyway, it’s always such fun to read an article that points to Michigan as an example of what not to do, which brings me to the point of this mini-tirade:

Excerpts from an article entitled, “When Did You Become Someone Else’s Intellectual Property?” by Bijan Sabet, a general partner at Spark Capital:

Silicon Valley represents America’s model of innovation. Because employee non-compete clauses are not enforceable in California, workers are free to pursue new ideas and opportunities, and the employer’s legitimate intellectual property rights are still protected by non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) and non-solicitation agreements (NSAs).

Yet Massachusetts, New York and Michigan are among dozens of other states that still enforce non-compete clauses. This isn’t just a philosophical debate. We have just to look to Michigan in 1985, when it made non-compete agreements enforceable again after 80 years. The result: Overall job mobility was immediately cut by 20 percent. In specialized technical fields, the damage was even more acute.

And then we get to the real issue here:

The non-compete makes the employee the company’s property for the term of the agreement, which typically extends far past the employee’s last day on the job. It essentially makes the claim that “Because you’re highly skilled, you belong to us even after you don’t work for us any more.”

This puts employees who choose to leave in an outrageous situation. They were paid during the term of their employment for work performed. Since they have left the company, they are no longer being paid. Yet the company still asserts a right of ownership of them as workers, simply because they used to pay them.

And yet, for whatever reason, our Michigan legislators apparently thought this was a good idea.  Just like they thought the Single Business Tax was a good idea.

By the way, it’s not just people in technical jobs that are affected by this.  I know of a guy who worked as a manager in a restaurant chain who, I was told, could not work at any other restaurant within 100 miles of his home town after he left his former position, for something like a year. And we are not even talking a fancy restaurant here – we’re talking a national chain of family-style restaurants (one that’s now in Chapter 11 – serves them right in my opinion!).

In my opinion it’s high time that the Legislature hired someone to go through all of Michigan’s laws and find the ones that are outdated, no longer relevant, detrimental to Michigan’s citizens, and unique to Michigan, and put the entire batch into sunset legislation. Then, if anyone can make a case for keeping a particular law, the legislature will still have the option to extend it.  Those that no one cares about will die a merciful death, but it will force the legislature to actively take a look at the rest and ask why Michigan is out of step with the times and/or the rest of the nation.  In a few cases there may actually be a good reason for it, but in many cases it’s because our legislators were listening to the lobbyists and the big corporations. I would add, “when they should have been listening to the people” but sometimes the public can be misled, too – if I recall correctly, the people actually voted on no-fault insurance (after the legislature put it on the ballot), but I just might be mistaken about that.

And one other thing I would support is a part-time legislature.  Several others states don’t feel the need to have their legislature on a full-time payroll, and given the financial crisis that Michigan is in right now, wouldn’t it make sense to put the people who got us into this mess into semi-retirement? There’s a whole lot of reasons that part-time legislatures make sense, but since this isn’t a political blog, I won’t expound on that further.

Oh, and for those who wonder how this relates to the topic of this blog, I have but one word (an acronym, actually): PBLES. Another absurd creation by a bunch of legislators that couldn’t be bothered to write sane legislation, or even copy what other states have done (and don’t even get me started on the virtual NXX mess).

Be sure to go read the full article that I referenced above, it’s fairly short and well worth the time it takes you to read it! Note: If you have a problem with the site not fully loading (or constantly reloading), try disabling Javascript. And you may also want to visit the Alliance for Open Competition website.