Question

The law in your state allows an employer to create an enforceable agreement that restricts an employee’s post-employment activities as long as the restriction is “reasonable” in terms of purpose, geographic area, and duration. Your employer is a dominant force in the technology, an industry ever changing at a rapid pace. As a result, top employees want the flexibility to move from company to company. Of course, having and keeping top employees is a competitive advantage. Assume you are an executive charged with determining whether your firm will embrace a post-employment restriction within its contracts of employment. If you adopt a justice theory approach, what result might you adopt and why? If you adopt a utilitarianism approach, what result might you adopt and why?

Answer 1

By applying justice theory approach, it can be considered that the employer is actually reducing the intent of the person to work at that particular location or area or simply in other words, he's actually killing the person's interest by forcing him and reducing his work motive and as a result, the output from the person or the result will be a lot lower than the usual. If I apply utilitarianism, then it would be quite easy to talk about the the net benefits and costs to all stakeholders which would be a lot high as retaining an employee against his interest would incur high costs and when he's not willing to work, the returns would be low as well. Therefore such lorms need to be flexible at times on the whole.