signbrad
New Member
This is true.
If I buy brickwork from a bricklayer, he gives me an invoice and I pay him from that. Then the invoice goes in my files. That piece of paper is now mine, right? I will share it with my tax preparer to use as a tax deduction to save some money on taxes. I may show it to friends of mine in the sign business so they can see how much the brick guy charges. And if I want to show the invoice to a new brick guy in order to get a better price from him, is that wrong? Does the first bricklayer have the right to tell me I can't? I wouldn't think so.
Further, if I instruct an employee to get some prices for me on a new brick job, and he digs out an old invoice from my files and uses it to negotiate a better price with a new bricklayer, am I going to chastise him? What if he saves me some money?
What if I find out later that my employee gave the job to his good friend and brother-in-law, a bricklayer, who had treated him to dinner at a nice restaurant and worked hard to persuade him to push my job his way? Is that wrong? What if the new guy saves me 600 dollars and the work is excellent? Am I going to reprimand my worker? Hardly. I'll take him out to dinner, too. And I will tell him to use the new brick guy in the future. And I'll ask him if he has any friends or relatives who are electricians.
But here is another scenario. What if my employee has a friend in the sign business, a competitor of mine, and he tries to help his friend by showing him my quote on a sign job so that his friend can underbid me. I would be annoyed, to say the least. I would probably let him go.
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These two situations are totally different.
Showing someone what you paid for something is not wrong. On the other hand, every business has information that they expect employees to keep confidential.
An employer has the right to protect things that qualify as 'trade secrets'—customer lists, product formulations, manufacturing processes—from theft by employees and competitors.
Trade secret law is a branch of intellectual property law that deals with protecting proprietary information against unauthorized use by others.
I knew a sign salesman that quit his job and went to work for another sign company. Before he left he downloaded a customer list from the server to give to the new employer. This was probably illegal whether the employee signed a nondisclosure agreement or not. Misappropriating confidential information is forbidden by the Uniform Trade Secrets Act and the Economic Espionage Act of 1996.