After 22 years working as a nurse in a Wisconsin hospital, Laura wanted a change. Finding a new job would have been hard enough but there was a bigger hurdle: a non-compete clause in her employment contract stipulated she could not work for a rival within 30 miles for at least two years. That did not leave many options for the single mother of three.

“I knew they weren’t paying me fairly,” said Laura, who asked not to use her real name because she had also signed a confidentiality agreement. When she told her bosses she planned to leave, “they very much threatened me”, saying she would be ineligible for her annual bonus and would have to run job applications past them, which she refused to do.

The 75-minute drive to her new job at a university medical centre across the state border in Illinois now takes her past several other hospitals that were off limits.