After the end of the fasting festival holiday, Indonesia enters a period of job change. The most common tendency is for people to receive the religious festival allowance before the major festival of breaking the fast, and to start looking for a job after that. At a time like this, the biggest concern may be the leakage of confidential information due to a job transfer to a competitor. Let's see if there is any way to prevent such job changes.

[Agreement to prohibit changing jobs]

Your employment contract may contain clauses that prohibit you from changing jobs to a competitor. Although it is possible to prevent confidential information from being taken out or leaked by creating a confidentiality agreement, it is not realistic to ensure that the information and skills imprinted in an employee's memory will not be used at a new job. If you want to thoroughly protect your company's confidentiality obligations, the best bet is not to transfer to a competitor. But is this agreement legal?
The Indonesian constitution recognizes the freedom to choose a job. Therefore, even if there is an agreement between labor and management, an agreement that obstructs freedom of choice of employment is invalid under the law. However, in order to prevent information leaks that could threaten the survival of the company, it has recently begun to be accepted to temporarily agree to prohibit changing jobs for a limited period of time. Even if an agreement that prohibits you from working for a competitor for the rest of your life is illegal, for example, from the termination of the employment relationship, 3 There have been cases where agreements have been recognized as legal, such as not working for a competitor within 2020 or not transferring directly to a competitor after the end of the employment relationship. If you don't change jobs to a competitor for a few years, the information you have will have been updated and will no longer be useful.

[Loophole for workers]

Skills, knowledge, and experience are the tools workers use when changing jobs. Every worker knows that his competitors will buy it at the highest price. If your knowledge and experience can be used equally well in other industries, such as in management, purchasing, or logistics, you probably won't have to worry too much about the industry you want to work in. On the other hand, competitors want the know-how you have accumulated in areas such as production technology, manufacturing, design, and sales. For those in the job-hopping group, who receive significant improvements in their pay each time they change jobs, prohibiting them from changing jobs to competitors is a big hindrance. Especially in the manufacturing of special products, there are many people who keep changing jobs within the same industry. Under such circumstances, there are cases where employees do not think deeply when joining the company, agree to an employment contract that includes a clause prohibiting changing jobs, and then when they think of changing jobs, they are sued by their current employer or are prevented from changing jobs. How will the workers survive such a situation?
The most common case is for a temporary employee to join another company. This involves asking a relative or friend to temporarily put you in a position, and then transferring to a competing company after the excitement has subsided. And already 1 The most common pattern is independent. This is a type of business in which workers start a business, set up their own company, and enter into subcontracting or partnership contracts with competitors. When starting a business, some people continue to work hard at their company, but many wait until the excitement dies down and then change jobs to competing companies over time. It's a cat-and-mouse game, but rather than thinking about ways to prevent people from changing jobs, thinking about how to create an environment where people want to work at your company seems to have a higher success rate.