Per the article: It told the doctor that it would enforce a contract clause requiring employees to give 120 days’ notice when quitting or pay a hefty fee, equivalent to his salary for the remainder of that four-month window. Management said, “We will make you pay” and “The contract will be enforced.”
If you mean show up but not do all the work, there might be something in the contract for that too, if they're putting this bullshit into it.
Why would anyone stand for it? Just stay home 'sick', or roll in late, take an actual hour for your lunch (scandalous!), take your legally required breaks, do the bare minimum, what are they gonna do, fire you?
Stuff like this continues because workers don't seem to realize they CAN just leave.
This. I always jokingly say if the company is not fair to me I will simply only do the tasks they actually assign to me as punishment. Which is probably gonna half my work. I understand not every profession is as self directed but you can certainly work to rule. In Europe eg your lunch break is not optional. So just go for 30min. Leave the building. If getting fired is no longer a concern I don’t understand what the employer has on you
It would be somewhere in the top ten after seizing worker passports.
Dystopia. Who wants to be a customer or patient being helped by a worker feeling that dire?
Somewhere between massive weekly turnover vs "paying to quit" has to be some sanity but individual workers have no bargaining power against corporations and governments.
Because it goes both ways. The employer has to adhere to the same period. This gives some safety for both parties. The employee can search for a new job if they are let go and the employer can plan for at least a quarter.
That said, a one-sided clause would not even be legal here.
Does the article say the employer has to adhere to this? Because my US employment contracts try very hard to make arbitrary, cause less, and notice-free dismissal built in.
You have to realize that the US governments have repeatedly taken then position that non executives do not have rights. There’s the concept of a “right to work” law in the US, and what that means is that a company can fire you at any time for any or no reason. Historically the government would use the policy to break strikes by having the police kill the strikes en mass, and as we see with the recent rail strike, the government will just make strike action illegal if you ever actually attempt it.
They mix pretty well (e.g. Germany's private health care system is doing fine, it's the public one that struggles). It's more that profit-seeking, few laws around labor contracts and zero morals don't mix well. That's not as much of a problem in Germany because there's lots of labor law regulating all kinds of things keeping the zero-morals-people in check, and voila, you don't see that kind of exploitation outside of criminal enterprises.
That said, at least 4 weeks notice are required in Germany, and you can sign a contract to increase the period, but the employee can never have a longer notice period than the employer.
> They mix pretty well (e.g. Germany's private health care system is doing fine, it's the public one that struggles)
The public one in Germany is struggling precisely why every public one everywhere is struggling: They defund the public healthcare to cripple it to justify privatizing it by saying 'it doesnt work'. Works every time as public believe it like idiots.
And no, the one that you have is not a mixed system 'that works'. Its a system in the middle of its privatization phase. When the transition is complete, youll see how things change.
Every time anything goes wrong in any public administration, people rush to assume it's a "starve the beast" tactic even when there's no evidence whatsoever it's the case.
You're making a lot of very confident assertions in that post without bothering to back them up.
If a public administration is having trouble and it is poorly funded, then at this point I think the burden of proof is on the one trying to claim the poor funding is not a) the cause of the poor performance, and b) a deliberate tactic on the part of those who want to take the money for themselves and their corporate friends.
The problem is that people simply claim that something is poorly funded without ever looking at the data, and then march on from that point. Here's some data: https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health-spending.htm
It's weird, like someone once had a flat tire on their bike and now whenever someone says that their bike is broken, they can't imagine it to be anything but a flat tire. Brakes aren't working? That's because you have a flat tire. Pedals are falling off? It's just a trick to confuse you so you don't notice the flat tire. Handlebar is backwards? You've just been trained to ignore the flat tire.
It is well-known that the US spends vastly more than other countries on health care for, at best, similar outcomes. And not only is most of our healthcare spending not actually through public institutions, the absolutely awful way our public and private healthcare institutions are set up actively prevents reasonable levels of spending.
Pointing at healthcare spending in the US and saying "ha-HA! that proves that public institutions aren't poorly funded!" really says much more about you than it does about healthcare, or public institutions.
Except I wasn't, I was talking about Germany, rank two in the list of spending (in this whole thread which nobody bothers to read, apparently). Only Germany's education system doesn't leave med students in debt, and they don't earn hundreds of thousands of euros a year, you don't get giant hospital bills etc.
Seriously, not every post on this site is talking about the US, especially when they specify otherwise. Americans only knowing their system and then extrapolating and assuming that it's the exact same everywhere one the planet is tiring.
And as long as the privatization continues, it will keep staying at rank two or rising. Looking at the state of a public healthcare system that is in the process of being privatized is not an argument for anything.
The public insurance system isn't being defunded or privatized, and it's the one that struggles to pay for services and requires a lot of taxes to kept upright. Hospitals were privatized decades ago, yes, and that lead to higher demands on the doctors and nurses, but that's not really the "struggling" part (they struggle finding staff, but that's another issue). And individual practitioners have always been private individuals running their own business.
> Its a system in the middle of its privatization phase.
Yeah, no, it's been set up this way since the beginning, feel free to look into it instead of speculating. The way it's set up is that doctors bill 2-2.3x to private insurances and subsidize their work for the public insurance system where they're very limited in how much they may bill per patient, regardless of how much time they spend on treatment.
> The public insurance system isn't being defunded or privatized, and it's the one that struggles to pay for services and requires a lot of taxes to kept upright
That's intentional. Part of the crippling of the public healthcare is done to force the people to go to private healthcare, who then bill the government for the services. Its how they such taxpayer money during the privatization phase.
> Yeah, no, it's been set up this way since the beginning, feel free to look into it instead of speculating
No public healthcare system was set up this way 40 years ago. Even in jurisdictions that had the potential to end up like this because of what was legally allowed, nowhere in the West it was like this. Creeping privatization of the last 40 years did this. Nothing else. Its time people stopped rationalizing and justifying how things are tumbling downhill.
> No public healthcare system was set up this way 40 years ago.
Okay. I mean, you could look it up [1] and check when the private insurance companies and coops (kinda) in Germany were founded, or you could just declare that it definitely wasn't ever done so. Whatever floats your boat.
You must have missed the part that I said that there being legal allowances for the system to have turned out how it is now does not mean that it was set up like that. Solely the strong presence of the state and the state rendering sufficient number of services can keep things under control in an actual mixed landscape through the pressure of pricing and availability. Which was the case in most jurisdictions.
Privatization in such systems starts when the state supplied services are crippled by 'reformers'. Even in wholly public systems, first allowing 'some' private medicine then strangling the public one to channel the activity to private ones and then justify privatizing everything is the go-to tactic.
There was a comment on this site recently that proposed the reason every healthcare system in the world is struggling is because medical research has been very effective at inventing newer and more involved procedures that make it possible to solve almost any problem but at increasing resource consumption.
Previously for many issues the treatment was very basic and ineffective but now we can 3D print organs, do complex transplants, and all kinds of crazy things which work but require immense resources that society can't afford. So we are left with the unpleasant situation of "Yes we do know how to cure this, but we can't afford to".
Indeed. People like to forget that doctors as a class are the primary beneficiaries of America's for-profit medical system, and their political influence is the strongest reason it continues. Debts owed to doctors is the leading cause of bankruptcy in America.
Doctors lower on the totem pole get screwed by doctors further along in their career, but that hardly phases them. This is a profession where the institution of hazing deeply entrenched. Doctors-in-training are hazed with sleep deprivation and overworking during residency, to the detriment of patients who suffer increased rates of medical errors. The harm is well understood but doctors continue this anyway, evidently under the logic of "I suffered through it, so I'll make the new guys suffer the same."
So allow me to play the world's smallest violin for the plight of these doctors.
There’s a huge generational component here, however: older doctors did quite well setting up independent, profitable practices but the younger ones are increasingly getting all of the drawbacks where insurance and market forces push them into corporate jobs which pay less and mean they’re subject to things like this. The money isn’t bad but as in most other fields it seems like the MBAs’ relentless value extraction is pushing the system towards the breaking point (it’ll be nurses first, but it’s not uncommon for there to be shortages of doctors, either).
Not to mention that a company which would do this seems like exactly the kind of place which would threaten to report slacking to the state medical board if they could find a way to portray it as endangering patients.
Just work supper slow and do a super good job; spend one hour or two with each patient. I don't see how that would result in any complaint to medical board. If patients complain, just tell them that the company is scheduling too many patients per day... Dare Concentra to release one earlier. What happens if one takes long lunch, show up to work late and leave early, calls in sick often? Is there any issue with the medical board? Does concentra have other stuff written into the contract about performance where one would have to pay 4 months of one's salary?
I have a friend who works in Singapore and the contract is the same. She had to give 3 months notice and if she left early, the penalty was the salary she would have earned over that period (i.e. leave after 2 months, you owe the company 1 month of salary).
It's more typically 1 month notice unless you're in a more senior role.
You can't fire me without notice, I can't quit without notice. Gives everyone time to get their affairs in order.
If that's the situation, don't be a petulant unethical crybaby about not getting what you want when you want it and do the job you're being paid to do.
Is this the job they signed up for, though? The working conditions sound bad and unless that was very clearly communicated before signing it sounds like the company isn’t keeping their side of the deal. There’s an enormous power differential here since they can easily make their employees’ lives bad but it’s ruinously expensive for an employee to get any sort of consequences for the company.
The employer should provide severance. Their act of removing a person's livelihood can have devastating consequences for the individual.
The employee shouldn't have to give notice, and forcing someone to PAY a fee to NOT work is forcing them to choose between wage theft and indentured servitude.
By and large, losing one employee won't make or break a company (and if it does, it should have given them more equity and/or autonomy to have a stake and sense of power to change some of the reasons they're leaving).
Losing an employee from one day to the next without any possibility to do knowledge transfer or implement a transition plan is far more disruptive than having then continue to work for a minimum period.
The idea that if you just pay people enough money they will work a single job their entire career and never quit is absurd.
The article specifically talks about doctors and nurses. There is no knowledge transfer going on. Even if I were to be generous to your argument, if the company trained a person to do that special job then they can train someone else.
Giving two weeks is a courtesy, nothing more. Forcing someone to work against their will ant great financial penalty is indentured servitude and the article cites court cases that are proceeding under human trafficking claims.
> Giving two weeks is a courtesy, nothing more. Forcing someone to work against their will ant great financial penalty is indentured servitude
What do you mean "against their will"? They have voluntarily signed a contract. I hope that contract is fair (notice goes both ways), but it's definitely transparent from the beginning. If you don't want that, don't sign such a contract.
Read the article. Imagine you were a foreign immigrant brought in to work as a nurse. Turns out you were sold a bait and switch, and the work conditions are straight from hell. However, the contract you signed said you’d owe them a $20,000 termination fee when you wanted to quit. But you don’t have $20k in the bank and where you’re from the monthly wage is equivalent to $100 USD so no one you know has that money either. They threaten to bury you with legal bills to defend yourself unless you pay to break the contract. So instead of quitting you suffer and try to save up $20k, but you’re barely making ends meet as it is, so maybe you’ll be able to buy your freedom after you’ve served out the contract.
I’m pretty certain you’d call that a modern form of indentured servitude. They got a judge to agree with that and currently have a case against the company for human trafficking.
It'd be interesting to see an analysis of whether it is enforceable (across states and so on).
The article talks about it in the context of non-compete agreements, which the provision is at least similar to (specifying what happens after the employee decides to terminate the relationship).
Losing a job is more devastating than losing an employee, though. At its worst, losing a job can mean losing healthcare, losing a home, having to move. Losing an employee at its worst usually means redistributing work for a few weeks or months.
Adding: in our profit-over-people centric world, where corporations are treated like an entirely invented class, elevated above the worker, I posit that corporations have more chance to be bailed out than people do.
You don’t see people pointing at homeless corporations saying, “that could be you, walmart.”
But you DO see corporations happy to have scared emps worried about being homeless, AND those same emps helping, through taxes, enable welfare so that walmart can pay less in wages.
Literally anything a public corporation does is evil. Every single one is required, by laws they lobby for, to put shareholder value over employees.
It would be fair if corporation would also allow new hires to wait 4 months due to Notice Period. But that is not the case. They want immediate joiners while their employees spend months after giving notice
The remarkable thing about the law is that it doesn't matter what you (ignorantly) think about it. Indentured servitude is illegal and it's incorrect for you to have a problem with that.
Notice periods are standard contractual terms in a lot of european countries. Some even have legally mandated minimums.
The fact that it may somehow fit the US definition for indentured servitude doesn't make it ignorant to think it's a fair deal. Laws aren't always perfect.
They are common enough in the US, too; they would only be indentured servitude if the government enfirced them by ordering specific performance rather than by way of damages for breach, which, in the US, it generally will not for labor contracts.
Interestingly, this is pretty much what it‘s like in Germany. My contract, for example, has a mutual notice period of 3 months. It‘s not legal to give the employee a longer notice period than the employer.
>> Legal experts say Concentra could have a tough time getting courts to uphold the 120-day rule, given how one-sided it is. “I think it would be really hard to enforce this in front of any reasonable judge,” says Jonathan Harris, a professor at Loyola Marymount University’s law school.
A "reasonable" judge would probably side with a little employee facing a massive penalty for quitting, but a doctor isn't the average employee. I'd bet good money that this doctor wasn't even an actual employee. I bet he was operating as a contactor business, with separate insurance/accounting and such. A judge will not look so kindly on a subcontractor business, one probably turning over six or even seven figures and perfectly capable of taking proper legal advice before signing anything.
The story very consistently refers to them as employees, and discusses things which would not apply to a contractor. The non-compete, for example, is something which would often lead to the contractor being reclassified as an employee.
Is that true? If I hire someone to build a website for me, am I forbidden from getting a non-compete to protect against them launching another website for the same business?
For an independent contractor, non-compete clauses could reclassify you as an employee. A non-compete for contractors can actually be an important factor in determining whether a worker is truly an employee rather than a contractor. If an independent contractor is reclassified as an employee, the company could be subjected to penalties, workers compensation insurance and overtime pay.
Even if you remain classified as a contractor, a non-compete clause may not be enforceable. Independent contractors are expected to be experts in their chosen field and are likely working for multiple companies at once. If one company attempts to enforce a non-compete clause, your ability to find work may be affected. If a non-compete clause unreasonably restrains your ability to work, most courts in the U.S. will not enforce it.
Non competes between firms are possible, but given extreme scrutiny due to antitrust and other issues.
It’s going to depend on the exact terms and value: if you pay someone well and it’s a narrowly targeted exception a judge is going to look at that more favorably than if you’re effectively telling them to move or find a different trade entirely.
https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/dangers-of-having-an-indep... notes a case which sounds similar to what you described where a non-compete was enforced because the company was able to demonstrate that the consultants had no prior experience in their industry and were using the skills and contacts they’d made on the job to launch a direct competitor.
Wait for a medmal suit to open the curtains on the layers of liability protection that permeate the medical profession. Employee v. contractor definitions change based on context. One can be an employee for purpose of labor relations on day one, but a contractor for insurance purposes on day two. Given the medical nature of the service and the multi-state scope of the company, I'd still bet there is a veritable Russian nesting doll of entities at play here.
They could fight it in court. They might not have a super strong case and might not win, but by fighting it they add additional costs for the corpos and between that and bad publicity it might be enough to convince them that letting them go is the better option despite the contract.
The legal analysts cited in the article make the claim that no reasonable judge would uphold the contract, and they cite several such lawsuits. It’s likely unenforceable. Most workers would just cave immediately though. Deploying corporate lawyers costs the company very little. Hitting a lawyer as individual is prohibitively expensive and time consuming and emotionally taxing affair so very few people ever fight it.
The equivalent law in rental real estate, in US, is that if you terminate the contract before term, you pay for all the lost revenue until the landlord finds a replacement, which they are obligated to search for in good faith. The rule for employment contract should be the same, perhaps with a discount for expenses not incurred.
I don't think that analogy is obvious. For example, the renter is paying the landlord for use of their property, while the occupational health employer is paying the employee for their time.
If the doctor was paying the facility for use of equipment and access to patients it wouldn't be unreasonable for that contract to have some term where some minimum payment was expected.
Three months notice has been standard in every contract I’ve ever had (UK and Germany) - but equally I have always been able to get my employer to shorten it when I wanted to take month off between jobs.
That’s unusual, in UK it’s more normal to see one month notice periods except for jobs which are “Key Person” risks to a company and where they need or want more notice to start a search, or to transfer knowledge and responsibilities.
What this has meant in my experience is most people employed as Software Engineers need to give a month, and senior leaders will potentially be on 3 months (notably, this often extends to individual contributors who are i.e. a Distinguished Engineer at a larger firm).
In the US the prevalent practice seems to be 2 weeks notice and this employer seems very predatory to me.
UK based software engineer - never seen anything other than 3 month notices. My wife was on 1 month when she was a junior data scientist but moved to 3 months 6 months later as she was promoted.
It was the same in Iceland where I'm originally from. 3 months by far the most common for engineers.
The one anomaly I've come across was Jump Trading. Their offer to me included a 12 month notice and a 36 month non compete. I told them to shove it and took another offer.
On signing: $2k for the worker and in return there’s a year or whatever noncompete, plus a required notice period. The worker can choose to accept or not, or return the bonus if they need to jump quickly.
This works out for everyone: employers can pay for what it’s worth to them, smart employees can invest that money and pocket interest income.
How is that still not predatory in the sense that you're then locking your skills related to that industry away for the rest of your/company's life? For what 2000? Personally the skills I have in my industry easily add 10k to 30k to my worth in my late 20's. I don't think any company can afford to make a fair compensation at scale to lock an employee out of working with any competitors aka being in the same industry again.
No. If a company wants a non compete for X amount of time, the company can pay me for X amount of time.
The reason companies are able to be so abusive towards their employees is that they can mandate no compete for any level of employee despite the _vast_ majority of employees having no magical knowledge that company. The result is that an employee can’t move to a higher paying job, and so their current employer can pay them even less.
Everywhere I have worked I have had a three month notice period and the employer could only give me notice for a valid reason such as down sizing or misconduct.
This is in the UK and Norway, I think it is probably similar in other European countries.
Generally the period can be negotiated when you give notice and employers will often simply pay you you some part or all of the salary that would be due and let you leave earlier unless they need you to finish some work or train someone else.
Take it to the extreme: suppose the contract demanded 1000 days notice. I hope no one would find this reasonable. I also can't think of any situation where paying to quit is reasonable. The court should strike this down.
If it's symmetrical I'm sure lots of people would be fine with a work contract that guarantees them income for almost 3 years even if it means they can't easily quit.
I know people in upper management roles in Switzerland that have 6 months notice. It's not a big deal.
Four sounds excessive. I think I have 1-2 while my employer has 3 from their side. That’s key, that the employer has the longer notice. As an employee I could probably transfer any knowledge required in a month or two, but if I’m laid off it’s good to know I’m paid for (at least) 3 months.
I expect good odds that the contract allows the company to fire the doctor with no notice or severence, but can’t read the article to confirm my suspicion.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 156 ms ] threadAny decent manager knows these are not enforceable in most cases
If you mean show up but not do all the work, there might be something in the contract for that too, if they're putting this bullshit into it.
Why would anyone stand for it? Just stay home 'sick', or roll in late, take an actual hour for your lunch (scandalous!), take your legally required breaks, do the bare minimum, what are they gonna do, fire you?
Stuff like this continues because workers don't seem to realize they CAN just leave.
Dystopia. Who wants to be a customer or patient being helped by a worker feeling that dire?
Somewhere between massive weekly turnover vs "paying to quit" has to be some sanity but individual workers have no bargaining power against corporations and governments.
That's true, but only if you play their game. Sometimes the only winning move is not to play.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DGNZnfKYnU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIRT6xRQkf8
No it's not. It's absolutely normal in Germany.
> Why would anyone stand for it?
Because it goes both ways. The employer has to adhere to the same period. This gives some safety for both parties. The employee can search for a new job if they are let go and the employer can plan for at least a quarter.
That said, a one-sided clause would not even be legal here.
You have to realize that the US governments have repeatedly taken then position that non executives do not have rights. There’s the concept of a “right to work” law in the US, and what that means is that a company can fire you at any time for any or no reason. Historically the government would use the policy to break strikes by having the police kill the strikes en mass, and as we see with the recent rail strike, the government will just make strike action illegal if you ever actually attempt it.
Also incredibly ugly that a company would put doctors in this position. Basic healthcare and profit motives don't mix.
That said, at least 4 weeks notice are required in Germany, and you can sign a contract to increase the period, but the employee can never have a longer notice period than the employer.
The public one in Germany is struggling precisely why every public one everywhere is struggling: They defund the public healthcare to cripple it to justify privatizing it by saying 'it doesnt work'. Works every time as public believe it like idiots.
And no, the one that you have is not a mixed system 'that works'. Its a system in the middle of its privatization phase. When the transition is complete, youll see how things change.
You're making a lot of very confident assertions in that post without bothering to back them up.
People rush to assume that because they have seen it many times before.
It's weird, like someone once had a flat tire on their bike and now whenever someone says that their bike is broken, they can't imagine it to be anything but a flat tire. Brakes aren't working? That's because you have a flat tire. Pedals are falling off? It's just a trick to confuse you so you don't notice the flat tire. Handlebar is backwards? You've just been trained to ignore the flat tire.
Pointing at healthcare spending in the US and saying "ha-HA! that proves that public institutions aren't poorly funded!" really says much more about you than it does about healthcare, or public institutions.
Seriously, not every post on this site is talking about the US, especially when they specify otherwise. Americans only knowing their system and then extrapolating and assuming that it's the exact same everywhere one the planet is tiring.
And as long as the privatization continues, it will keep staying at rank two or rising. Looking at the state of a public healthcare system that is in the process of being privatized is not an argument for anything.
> Its a system in the middle of its privatization phase.
Yeah, no, it's been set up this way since the beginning, feel free to look into it instead of speculating. The way it's set up is that doctors bill 2-2.3x to private insurances and subsidize their work for the public insurance system where they're very limited in how much they may bill per patient, regardless of how much time they spend on treatment.
That's intentional. Part of the crippling of the public healthcare is done to force the people to go to private healthcare, who then bill the government for the services. Its how they such taxpayer money during the privatization phase.
> Yeah, no, it's been set up this way since the beginning, feel free to look into it instead of speculating
No public healthcare system was set up this way 40 years ago. Even in jurisdictions that had the potential to end up like this because of what was legally allowed, nowhere in the West it was like this. Creeping privatization of the last 40 years did this. Nothing else. Its time people stopped rationalizing and justifying how things are tumbling downhill.
Okay. I mean, you could look it up [1] and check when the private insurance companies and coops (kinda) in Germany were founded, or you could just declare that it definitely wasn't ever done so. Whatever floats your boat.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Germany
Privatization in such systems starts when the state supplied services are crippled by 'reformers'. Even in wholly public systems, first allowing 'some' private medicine then strangling the public one to channel the activity to private ones and then justify privatizing everything is the go-to tactic.
Previously for many issues the treatment was very basic and ineffective but now we can 3D print organs, do complex transplants, and all kinds of crazy things which work but require immense resources that society can't afford. So we are left with the unpleasant situation of "Yes we do know how to cure this, but we can't afford to".
Doctors lower on the totem pole get screwed by doctors further along in their career, but that hardly phases them. This is a profession where the institution of hazing deeply entrenched. Doctors-in-training are hazed with sleep deprivation and overworking during residency, to the detriment of patients who suffer increased rates of medical errors. The harm is well understood but doctors continue this anyway, evidently under the logic of "I suffered through it, so I'll make the new guys suffer the same."
So allow me to play the world's smallest violin for the plight of these doctors.
It's more typically 1 month notice unless you're in a more senior role.
I guess it was carried over from the UK.
You can't fire me without notice, I can't quit without notice. Gives everyone time to get their affairs in order.
If that's the situation, don't be a petulant unethical crybaby about not getting what you want when you want it and do the job you're being paid to do.
Rights come with responsibilities.
The employer should provide severance. Their act of removing a person's livelihood can have devastating consequences for the individual.
The employee shouldn't have to give notice, and forcing someone to PAY a fee to NOT work is forcing them to choose between wage theft and indentured servitude.
By and large, losing one employee won't make or break a company (and if it does, it should have given them more equity and/or autonomy to have a stake and sense of power to change some of the reasons they're leaving).
The idea that if you just pay people enough money they will work a single job their entire career and never quit is absurd.
Giving two weeks is a courtesy, nothing more. Forcing someone to work against their will ant great financial penalty is indentured servitude and the article cites court cases that are proceeding under human trafficking claims.
What do you mean "against their will"? They have voluntarily signed a contract. I hope that contract is fair (notice goes both ways), but it's definitely transparent from the beginning. If you don't want that, don't sign such a contract.
I’m pretty certain you’d call that a modern form of indentured servitude. They got a judge to agree with that and currently have a case against the company for human trafficking.
The article talks about it in the context of non-compete agreements, which the provision is at least similar to (specifying what happens after the employee decides to terminate the relationship).
You don’t see people pointing at homeless corporations saying, “that could be you, walmart.”
But you DO see corporations happy to have scared emps worried about being homeless, AND those same emps helping, through taxes, enable welfare so that walmart can pay less in wages.
Literally anything a public corporation does is evil. Every single one is required, by laws they lobby for, to put shareholder value over employees.
The fact that it may somehow fit the US definition for indentured servitude doesn't make it ignorant to think it's a fair deal. Laws aren't always perfect.
A "reasonable" judge would probably side with a little employee facing a massive penalty for quitting, but a doctor isn't the average employee. I'd bet good money that this doctor wasn't even an actual employee. I bet he was operating as a contactor business, with separate insurance/accounting and such. A judge will not look so kindly on a subcontractor business, one probably turning over six or even seven figures and perfectly capable of taking proper legal advice before signing anything.
https://www.weisbergcummings.com/are-non-compete-agreements-...
Is a Non-Compete Clause Enforceable?
For an independent contractor, non-compete clauses could reclassify you as an employee. A non-compete for contractors can actually be an important factor in determining whether a worker is truly an employee rather than a contractor. If an independent contractor is reclassified as an employee, the company could be subjected to penalties, workers compensation insurance and overtime pay.
Even if you remain classified as a contractor, a non-compete clause may not be enforceable. Independent contractors are expected to be experts in their chosen field and are likely working for multiple companies at once. If one company attempts to enforce a non-compete clause, your ability to find work may be affected. If a non-compete clause unreasonably restrains your ability to work, most courts in the U.S. will not enforce it.
Non competes between firms are possible, but given extreme scrutiny due to antitrust and other issues.
https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/dangers-of-having-an-indep... notes a case which sounds similar to what you described where a non-compete was enforced because the company was able to demonstrate that the consultants had no prior experience in their industry and were using the skills and contacts they’d made on the job to launch a direct competitor.
If the doctor was paying the facility for use of equipment and access to patients it wouldn't be unreasonable for that contract to have some term where some minimum payment was expected.
What this has meant in my experience is most people employed as Software Engineers need to give a month, and senior leaders will potentially be on 3 months (notably, this often extends to individual contributors who are i.e. a Distinguished Engineer at a larger firm).
In the US the prevalent practice seems to be 2 weeks notice and this employer seems very predatory to me.
It was the same in Iceland where I'm originally from. 3 months by far the most common for engineers.
The one anomaly I've come across was Jump Trading. Their offer to me included a 12 month notice and a 36 month non compete. I told them to shove it and took another offer.
On signing: $2k for the worker and in return there’s a year or whatever noncompete, plus a required notice period. The worker can choose to accept or not, or return the bonus if they need to jump quickly.
This works out for everyone: employers can pay for what it’s worth to them, smart employees can invest that money and pocket interest income.
The reason companies are able to be so abusive towards their employees is that they can mandate no compete for any level of employee despite the _vast_ majority of employees having no magical knowledge that company. The result is that an employee can’t move to a higher paying job, and so their current employer can pay them even less.
This is in the UK and Norway, I think it is probably similar in other European countries.
Generally the period can be negotiated when you give notice and employers will often simply pay you you some part or all of the salary that would be due and let you leave earlier unless they need you to finish some work or train someone else.
I know people in upper management roles in Switzerland that have 6 months notice. It's not a big deal.