How many workers would succeed at so-restricting the people at the top of the company, in that contract? Pretty much none, right? Probably you're thinking it'd be absurd for them to even ask such a thing. Why? Because this is a matter of class, and the worker isn't of the right social class to be afforded such liberty, while others are. And the worker can't force such a clause despite that resistance. Why? Because they're by-far the weaker party in the negotiation. If these weren't true, it wouldn't seem so immediately absurd to even suggest such a thing.
Why don't people who can avoid these clauses embrace them anyway, since the justification is that the company needs and deserves your undivided attention to the greatest legally allowed degree, when they have far more power over the company and are being rewarded far more for their effort? The same reasoning applies far more to them! Because it's very undesirable to be restricted in that way, of course, so damn the company's best interests.
If it's very undesirable to be restrained by these, and the benefit to the employer is evidently not so large that it's necessary to restrict those for whom the reasoning applies 1,000x more than for some lowly peon, why do normal workers accept those clauses approximately 100% of the time they're demanded? Because they don't feel they have a choice.
Right, there are many cases where an adversarial power dynamic gets disguised, dressed-up as just the voluntary freedom of the majestic unbound human spirit etc.
At the extreme end, "slavery or death" may be an individual choice, but it's not the kind we want to celebrate or encourage.
___
> "I should not agree with your young [socialistic] friends," said Marcus curtly, "I am so old-fashioned as to believe in free contract."
> "I, being older, perhaps believe in it even more," answered M. Louis smiling. "But surely it is a very old principle of law that a leonine contract is not a free contract. And it is hypocrisy to pretend that a bargain between a starving man and a man with all the food is anything but a leonine contract." He glanced up at the fire-escape, a ladder leading up to the balcony of a very high attic above. "I live in that garret; or rather on that balcony. If I fell off the balcony and hung on a spike, so far from the steps that somebody with a ladder could offer to rescue me if I gave him a hundred million francs, I should be quite morally justified in using his ladder and then telling him to go to hell for his hundred million. Hell, indeed, is not out of the picture; for it is a sin of injustice to force an advantage against the desperate. Well, all those poor men are desperate; they all hang starving on spikes. If they must not bargain collectively, they cannot bargain at all. You are not supporting contract; you are opposing all contract; for yours cannot be a real contract at all."
Haha, nice, the Dover edition of that book's my current in-an-outdoor-setting-while-the-kids-play read, though that season's only just started so I'm not far in yet. Love me some Chesterton.
I went through The Man Who Was Thursday after it was referenced in Deus Ex (2000). Unfortunately it was a bit too surreal for my reading-for-fun tastes. Still, he's got quotable stuff.
I'm no contract lawyer but I don't think you can get in legal trouble for this if you're a salary employee. Work is work and your salary is your salary - it's not like you're stealing time, regardless of how much our corporate overlords would like us to believe. You're paid in salary.
I'm not saying it's a crime. I'm saying it's not your boss demanding you work only for them.
If you do have that arrangement, it's because you signed a contract to agree to those terms. The CEO that is the CEO of multiple companies (rare, but it definitely happens) signed a contract to agree to those terms, and is no doubt bound by other terms.
That reference to one-sided exclusivity via contract law reminds me of a recent Doctorow piece [0]:
> Capitalists hate capitalism. They don’t want to be exposed to the risks entailed by competition, and feel the goad of that insecurity. They want monopolies, or platforms, or monopoly platforms. They want assets, not businesses.
> They want to be able to fire employees at will – but they want those same employees to be bound to them just as surely as serfs were bound to their lords’ land.
No one's worshipping anything in this scenario. The company is "worshipping" the document by paying you on time the amount agreed, and abiding by everything else it says, and the employee is "worshipping" the document by doing the same.
Living your life the way you want presumably doesn't include you wanting other people breaking their obligations to you. Why do you want to do it to them?
Also the boss: claims to hold five jobs at five different organizations.
(I don't even mean Elon, I mean the median "founder" type, but him too I guess, except that I think he's up to more than five)