That is just unjustifiably gross. I get wanting to have noncompetes for people with nonpublic information that could be used to harm the company (note: I said “get” and not “agree”), but to slap a non compete on a close-to-minimum-wage worker whose most secret information is how many pickles to put on a sandwich? Makes my skin crawl.

Agreed completely - these are clearly anticompetitive in nature, rather than anything to do with protecting company IP.

FTC is probably overdoing this though; I sat out a full year on a compensated noncompete couple years back for a very good reason and the use case is still very much there for industries with sensitive information.

Proscribing noncompetes will make hiring very difficult going forward - one bad hire and your alpha walks out of the door...

I think the fear is a bit overblown. California already doesn't allow non-competes as far as I know.

There are already criminal and civil remedies available if trade secrets or IP are misused. Preventing employees from taking other employment based upon some hypothetical possibility is Minority Report territory and should not be socially acceptable.