Food, Labor / Employment

Jimmy John's Serves Up Sandwiches And Oppressive Non-Compete Agreements

In other words, non-compete are not intended to keep 18-year-old delivery drivers from seeking employment. Yet that's exactly how bread and meat purveyor Jimmy John's uses them.

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The Platonic ideal of a non-compete agreement envisions an engineer who worked on a team perfecting the latest iPhone quitting in the middle of the night to take a job heading up the Samsung product development team. That’s the sort of industry where companies have a legitimate interest in protecting their intellectual property. And hell, even there the agreement is probably not valid since Apple is based in California and they frown upon non-compete agreements. In any event, non-compete agreements are intended to cover something pretty close to rocket science.

In other words, non-compete are not intended to keep 18-year-old delivery drivers from seeking employment. Yet that’s exactly how bread and meat purveyor Jimmy John’s uses them. A class action lawsuit filed against the company reveals that they force the lowliest of their lowly employees to sign away their rights to work almost anywhere in the food industry as a condition of employment. And we have a copy….

Here’s what these jerks were making employees sign per the Huffington Post:

Employee covenants and agrees that, during his or her employment with the Employer and for a period of two (2) years after … he or she will not have any direct or indirect interest in or perform services for … any business which derives more than ten percent (10%) of its revenue from selling submarine, hero-type, deli-style, pita and/or wrapped or rolled sandwiches and which is located with three (3) miles of either [the Jimmy John’s location in question] or any such other Jimmy John’s Sandwich Shop.

Ten. Percent. That likely excludes a ton of other food businesses. In fact, the lawyer on the case, Kathleen Chavez, offered the hypothetical case study of an Illinois high schooler who heads to college at the University of Alabama and is shut out of working anywhere in Tuscaloosa that serves at least 10 percent sandwiches up to and including the school cafeteria due to the three mile EEZ around Jimmy John’s.

And to what end? Is the siren song of Jared Fogel so compelling that Jimmy John’s has to resort to contractual shenanigans to protect Lord Sandwich’s secret recipe? Thankfully, saner heads should prevail on the law.

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“A guy who’s putting a piece of roast beef between two pieces of rye bread — the challenge for the employer is to show what the hell this person knows that will hurt you,” said one expert on non-compete agreements, who asked not to be named since he isn’t involved in the case.

“Without making a judgment about Jimmy John’s, I would say the lower you go down the food chain of employees, the question becomes a little more pressing: What is your legitimate business reason here?”

Unfortunately, we can guess at the not-so-legitimate business reasons of Jimmy John’s. Why might a company force people on the lower end of the experience scale to sign an agreement that threatens them with legal action if they leave? To hoodwink inexperienced kids into accepting without question any sort of abuse they get on the job, perhaps? That theory would certainly fit the narrative for a company with a reputation for firing workers for contemplating unionization and faces a pair of lawsuits alleging systematic wage theft — one of which features this non-compete nonsense.

Perhaps Jimmy John’s has another side to the story. As Kitchenette noted:

A company spokeswoman refused to comment, because Jimmy John’s doesn’t give even a semblance of a fuck about basic human decency, and they’re scared that if they have to publicly comment on this issue, that’ll become blatantly obvious.

On that note, maybe the best observation comes from the brilliant Rick & Morty. When the family’s teenaged daughter found herself working for Satan in his “Twilight Zone, Ray Bradbury, Friday the 13th the series, Voodoo crap magic” store, she balked at walking away from the job noting: “Is there a company hiring teenagers that isn’t evil?”

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Probably not, but we can endeavor to raise the bar just a tad.

The full non-compete agreement is available on the next page…

Jimmy John’s Makes Low-Wage Workers Sign ‘Oppressive’ Noncompete Agreements [Huffington Post]
Jimmy John’s Non-Compete Agreements Are Utterly Psychotic [Kitchenette / Jezebel]

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