alt Hacker NewsSorry, what was forced about the NDA?
Did I miss the part where a gun was held to their head?
If I offer you money to eat a turd, is it your view that you are being forced to eat the turd?
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>If I offer you money to eat a turd, is it your view that you are being forced to eat the turd?
Look, I'm not here to kink shame, but that's not the right forum for that sort of fetish.
Anyway. You seem to have a trouble understanding the concept of severance.
Severance is just a form of compensation for work that was performed.
It is not given to someone who did not work for the company. It gets taxed as compensation. It is compensation.
There are limits to what an employer can demand of an employee for compensation.
There are limits to what employer can make the compensation contingent on.
Making a bonus contingent on engaging in your fetishes is definitely not OK.
Hope that's clear.
This goes to the issue of whether severance is compensation for past work or consideration for future work, which is a legal gray area.
The pro-compensation crowd assumes that because severance is taxed as compensation, that it is payment for past work, and therefore any non-disparagement clauses are illegal.
This is something I have seen just stated as if it was an iron-clad fact, rather than something that the courts don't actually uphold at present.
The pro-consideration crowd says that while severance is considered compensation after it is granted, the procedure of needing to sign a contract saying "you cannot disparage us if you want this payment" together with the fact that severance is optional and not mandated by law, means that it falls into the consideration category, and your end of the bargain is to not disparage the company if you want the severance, otherwise don't sign the contract and you wont get the severance.
That said, what is a more interesting take is whether states should make non-disparagement clauses illegal in the same way that many states have made NDA clauses illegal. That would basically force companies to not demand this in exchange for severance. This has the upside of being legally unambiguous but the downside of needing to actually fight for states to pass these laws, as opposed to just assuming that non-disparagement clauses are illegal under existing laws, which isn't an argument that will find much sympathy in the courts.