>If severance was part of your compensation, it would be part of the contract you sign. Instead, it's something in addition to your contract.

What you are pointing out is a legal loophole.

In the same way I got legal psychedelic mushrooms after making a donation to the institution that distributed them as religious sacraments.

I didn't get a receipt, so it was not a "sale", legally speaking.

In normal human terms, I bought those mushrooms, and I earned my severance pay.

It's can be an unspecified part of the compensation package, but one that is absolutely counted on.

A company known for no severance for high level positions would struggle to hire people unless they offered something to compensate for it.

>So it's very hard to argue that severance is compensation for past work when the company can choose not to give any severance

Same applies to year-end bonuses, so I can't accept this part of the argument.

>Basically the reality is that business offer severance as a type of bribe for people not to sue them or disparage them

We wouldn't have this discussion if it were the case. Bribes aren't enforced in courts.

The legal thing to do is to do the opposite of what you are bribed to do.

The reality is that businesses figured out a way to withold compensation unless the employee agrees to a gag clause, by exploiting a legal loophole.

They'd put it in the employment contract if they could get away with that.

>This is why the courts have rejected your line of reasoning.

Again: we're in agreement regarding the current legal status of non-disparagement clauses.

The issue I have is people considering those as fair, seeing severance as a privilege, and seeing violation of the non-disparagement clauses a moral failure.

In particular, there are multiple comments putting the credibility of Sarah Wynn-Williams in question, as well as seeing the gag order as justified.

If we roll with the bribe analogy: doing the thing that you were bribed not to do is seen as a laudable thing to do.

But here, we see people siding with the entity that pays bribes.

That's before we even get to the discussion of how certain things should not be bought and sold at all, as a matter of principle.

We universally agree that one shouldn't be allowed to buy or sell people (including oneself) into slavery.

Disallowing purchase or sale of sex isn't seen as problematic by many people.

Non-compete clauses are illegal in California, which is equivalent to saying that the freedom of choice who to work for (i.e, the right to accept a job offer when you're unemployed) may not be sold. You can't sign it away in a contract (including a severance contract).

Going back to what you said: bribes are generally illegal, even though the actions that are bought with bribes are.

That's because when it comes to, say, government officials, we decided that their choices and decision-making power are not things that could be, in principle, bought or sold.

The same, I argue, should apply to the right to disparage (colloquially: talk shit about) anyone and anything, including one's former employer.

It shouldn't be a thing one can buy or sell.

Particularly in a country founded on freedom of speech being a moral value.

On that note, when the courts get involved in enforcing those "non-disparagement" clauses in the US, I consider it to be a 1st Amendment violation (the government punishing people for speech). There's no provision in the Amendment that excepts speech which someone was privately paid to not produce.

The laws establishing the legality of non-disparagement clauses quite literally abridge the from of speech.

I fully understand that, somehow, they are, as of today, considered constitutional.

But then, so was slavery.