My sense is it's the judge trying to be too clever. The original employer said they can't leave because it would cause harm to public health. The judge said fine they can't take a new job but they're also not forced to work for you, so basically cut the baby in half and squeezing both parties to force a resolution. Of course that's completely contrary to the claim that blocking the workers from changing jobs is justified by a health emergency so it's just pro-corporate bullshit in the end.

The judge seems to be a clown who got kicked off truancy court for being mean to kids. Failing up, I guess.

The thing I didn't see in the story was whether the employees have to be paid by ThedaCare while they're not allowed to take other work. That's been a big piece of compromise on noncompetes- if you want to restrict people from making money working for a competitor you need to pay them living expenses during the exclusion period (I believe the term is garden leave.) Anyway there was no indication a noncompete was involved in this case hence the bullshit "harmful to public health" claim.
If you tell someone they can't take a new job but also the original employer won't pay them that seems problematic.

The judge is trying to get the two corporations to come to a deal about the employees. Which seems like some kind of antitrust thing to me.

It seems like this was a few-days temporary restraining order until the hearing upcoming literally today.

Still seems like legal bullshit since there's no law the petitioning hospital should be able to show it was likely to win on. And they were bold enough to complain about it being "poaching" which is the terminology of wage-fixing employers. (Possibly not in the complaint.)

Excessively corporatist on the part of the judge.

Yeah, I think this may be pure power-mad trial court judge shenanigans. There could be something odd going on that justifies it -- Sam who comments here sometimes suggested on Twitter that if there were merger negotiations going on, there's sometimes a preliminary agreement where each party agrees not to use non-public information to poach the other's employees. But there's nothing going on in the coverage suggesting that's actually a factor.

But "I'm going to make crazy rulings until you settle and get this case out of my courtroom" is definitely a thing bad trial court judges do.

Why did the plaintiff file then? Hoping to get a bad judge might be a useful strategy if you know the local court. But the temporary win is certainly going to hurt them more than the competition.

"After approaching ThedaCare with the chance to match the offers they'd been given, Breister wrote that they were told "the long term expense to ThedaCare was not worth the short term cost," and no counter-offer would be made."

Assholes.

Short answer is I don't know, there may be something to the case as a whole that I can't understand from the coverage -- there's some claim that the plaintiff is a necessary stroke/cardiovascular treatment center that's going to have to shut down, and while that can't be a justification for forcing employees to work for it for cheap, there might be more to the rest of the case. Other short answer is that if I understood why even well-funded professional litigants brought stupid baseless cases, I'd understand my job better than I do.

I have no problem viewing hospital administrators as a special blend of evil and incompetence if that's the best answer.

It seems like Wisconsin has a problem with terrible judges. The judge in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial comes to mind.

Presumably Scott Walker did his best.

Presumably some combination of judges being elected and Wisconsin Republicans being one of the batshittier subsets of the GOP?

Looks like this reporter is in the courtroom with cellphone excluded, so updates maybe as soon as a few hours from now.

Also this judge:

MADISON - A Waukesha County judge on Friday kept in place his decision from last week that determined absentee ballot drop boxes can't be used in Wisconsin. Waukesha County Circuit Judge Michael Bohren last week ruled ballot drop boxes could not be used in Wisconsin because state law says absentee ballots must be returned by mail or in person.

The Running Dogs of the Biden administration have been quite good on the subject of antitrust law and its relationship with no-poach agreements. I like this piece for both its clear explanation and the fact that the author puts his cards on the table up front and discloses his own slant on the issue:

Jail time for agreeing with a competitor not to solicit or hire their employees? Sounds like fiction, but, under the U.S. Department of Justice's recent "antitrust guidance for human resource professionals," such an outcome is a reality that HR professionals (and their companies) need to understand and navigate.

Lock 'em up!

I wonder if the hospital case turns on something like this (from my link):

Examples of conduct that could constitute a business tort in the context of an unlawful raid situation include ... actively working with employees to solicit current coworkers while those employees are still employed by their employer (also known as aiding and abetting a breach of a duty of loyalty) [or] attempting to "lift out" a business unit for the purpose of harming a competitor's ability to fairly compete in the marketplace.

So, per the link at 14, the judge dropped the injunction and everyone can go work at the new place tomorrow.

Your guest post worked!

Go me.

I mean, you helped too. But mostly it was me.

You're the wind beneath my wings.

A little beano will take care of that.

Well, I learned the term 'garden leave' which we definitely do not have, at least not outside a contractual provision of the kind I've never seen.

I don't want to know the mechanism whereby Beano stops armpit farts, do I?

If I eat chicken cooked with bones in it, my farts always smell the same way.

24: Tim says garden leave is common when senior executives at Pharma companies take new jobs.

Or after they eat chicken off it's a nice day.

-off

Anyway, I'm sure running a pharma company is more than just roasted chickens and puttering about your own yard on full pay.

I do wonder if this was a situation where the online indignation did some good. Not granting the injunction is good, but there's really no legit explanation for why he granted the TRO in the first place. So if the judge hadn't been aware that there was nationwide attention focused on his clowning, he might have kept it in place longer.

I guess there's still a legal case outside of the TRO, per the reporter at 14.

I mean, they're still suing, but I'm still not sure what their legal basis is - the other hospital is committing a tort? Some broad reinterpretation of a trauma center's responsibility to maintain critical services, to include another hospital's services?

And here I thought MA had pretty crazy non-compete, poaching, etc. laws. I will mention that in the past (and probably quietly in the present) Silicon Valley companies had sub rosa agreements not to engage in salary bidding wars. I don't know if that's still the case. The MA non-compete laws are there to prevent SV companies from poaching what used to be a thriving high-tech cluster. Since CA won't enforce such laws it didn't do any good. (Of course now we have a thriving biotech industry; who knows if they are doing the same stuff?)

Is there any evidence in the article/lawsuit that there was an agreement that the employees couldn't change jobs? I didn't see one. The idea that the "health emergency" allows your employer to have you as a chattel until it's over is beyond nuts.

Didn't they have to pay a settlement for that agreement?

Most MA biotechs and pharma have some non-compete you have to sign when you are hired. However no company that I'm aware of has ever tried to enforce this at the non-executive level. I've heard they won't try to enforce because any legal action might knock over the whole house of cards and invalidate them all, so they'd rather have compliance via the threat of litigation instead of actually enforcing the agreements. At the executive level they seem enforceable because there are explicit pay and benefits tied to the agreement to not work for a competitor for a given period.
My particular contract has a "covenant to not compete" and includes a 1 year blackout period working for any competitor of current company unless current company gives permission. But we've had dozens of people do that in my time here and the only thing they do is closely monitor whether you're stealing any documents so I assume permission is pro-forma or just ignored. They are somewhat more sensitive about poaching which is also excluded for a year and I know there have been nastygrams sent in some cases but no actual litigation I'm aware of.

Poaching specifically being a former employee using their knowledge of other worker's skills or knowledge to recruit away former colleagues, not just a competing company trying to recruit people based on public information.

It's weird how many things you can do with both eggs and employees.

Formally speaking I was poached when I switched from two jobs ago to last job (the one I discussed with some people at unfoggeDCon who wisely told me to take the job.)
A former colleague had left about 6 months earlier, I went out to lunch with him to catch up. He mentioned his new place has a good job available, and a couple days later his boss mysteriously called me asking if I'd be interested. Former colleague got a mean letter after I quit and new place told them to fuck off.

You can have eggs and colleagues at lunch.

It's a trick question because eggs' colleagues are generally other eggs.

It's called poaching because when done properly your employees are runny?

Poaching in Excelsis

("Two men were fined £120 apiece for poaching a white rhinoceros" --- South African Press.)

I've poached a pickel paitricks when the leaves were turnin' sere,
I've poached a twa-three hares an' grouse, an' mebbe whiles a deer,
But ou, it seems an unco thing, an' jist a wee mysterious,
Hoo any mortal could contrive to poach a rhinocerious.

I've crackit wi' the keeper, pockets packed wi' pheasants' eggs,
An' a ten-pun' saumon hangin' doun in baith my trouser legs,
But eh, I doot effects wud be a wee thing deleterious
Gin ye shuld stow intil yer breeks a brace o' rhinocerious.

I mind hoo me an' Wullie shot a Royal in Braemar,
An' brocht him doun tae Athol by the licht o' mune an' star.
An' eh, Sirs! but the canny beast contrived tae fash an' weary us---
Yet stags maun be but bairn's play beside a rhinocerious.

I thocht I kent o' poachin' jist as muckle's ither men,
But there is still a twa-three things I doot I dinna ken;
An' noo I cannot rest, my brain is growin' that deleerious
Tae win awa' tae Africa an' poach a rhinocerious.

I love that -- who wrote it?

George Menzies, occasional poet, essayist and secretary of the Royal Society of Arts in the early 20th century.

Usually snippy when people say it in person but satisfying in this case: the first sentence of Ascension's brief was "Your failure to prepare is not my personal emergency."

Ha, I just noticed that I cut and pasted "suggestion" in the OP title, from Moby's email. I don't know why you all trust me with the keys to this place.

I assumed you were trying to distance yourself from it.

Antiwork is now private. I guess I'll have to rely on you all to let me know about labor relations.

My kid claims he's partly responsible for it going private. He criticized the mod for going on Fox and the mod banned him from antiwork. So he posted the fact that the mod banned him on another Reddit and got 50k upvotes there and the antiwork mod got him banned there too and took antiwork private.

I think lots of people were doing similar things.

I was avoiding work by reading it on "new" earlier today. Many posts about the mods being on Fox and deleting all criticism.

Good I can tell him he's full of crap.

Of course, those all got deleted before they got any karma. Anyway, he's surely right for certain values of "partly."

It's back up. Good luck to the people volunteering to teach the anarchists how to do public relations.

They withdrew the lawsuit completely now, for those still following.