Think "at will" employment.
Your company can pretty well do as it pleases and there is not much you, as an employee, can do to stop it nor do you have much recourse. (Unless the people who are all being forced out are of a specific class protected by law from discrimination).
If you refuse to sign an intellectual property/non compete agreement (and I bet there is a binding arbitration clause in there as well), the company can likely fire you. In some states, the company MAY have difficulty enforcing a non-compete agreement,
The good news is your co-worker's g-mail account is safe. Recent federal law pretty much protects third party e-mail from disclosure to employers or other not subscriber (Company e-mail is another matter, you must assume it is monitored at all times), SR
-------------- Original message -------------- From: shag <shag at cleandraws.com>
> *sigh*
>
> at work they're trying to sell the company. it's this huge ass
> conglomeration with lots of smaller businesses doing similar things in
> various markets.
>
> as a consequence,
, but they are now
> asking us to sign this pretty damn intimidating Intellectual Property
> agreement.
>
> It's got a lot of the usual crap in it: anything you create on the job
> belongs to them, some address of non-compete issues, some address to trade
> secrets.
are
> claiming that they refuse to sign it, just based on their reading.
>
> partly, they are angry b/c they think that, if they use a gmail account to
> keep records -- which one guy does (and he shouldn't store his shit on
> google, i know, but he won't listen to me about security) is convinced that
> this will mean that the company will confiscate his email account.
>
> i told him that it would always boil down to $$.for the company to go after
> him,