Non-compete agreements from Geoffrey Chaucer's day to our own

The Starbucks Barista's Tale.

A new omicron variant has emerged that’s finally able to infect the most overbearingly smug rule-followers. I am speaking, of course, about myself. So I’ll make this brief. Geoffrey Chaucer was last week found innocent of rape but guilty, possibly, of poaching the help, which in those days was punishable by imprisonment under a law passed in response to the labor shortage created by the Black Plague. The Latin raptus, whose use in a document first raised the rape suspicion back in the late 19th century, can also mean abduction, or something more innocent still, as appears to have been the case here. Some sort of settlement was worked out to the satisfaction of all parties. But I was struck by the fact that contemporary society still imposes non-compete agreements on low-wage workers, and I wrote about that in The New Republic.