Risk-Avoidance provisions in employee contracts are more common than you might think. Think of it as insurance on an investment. Employers pay huge sums to retain these “ultimate performers.” The employment contract is one way to try to ensure that your precious and irreplaceable commodity (i.e., the all-star employee), doesn’t voluntarily put your investment in harm’s way.

The activities subject to risk-avoidance provisions vary greatly. From driving motorcycles to skydiving, the sky’s the limit on what types of “dangerous” engagements can be prohibited.

The Human Capitalist has a short post on Why Professional Athletes Have Provisions in their Employee Contracts. We’ve posted about this topic before in the context of Philly’s own ex-newsreporter, Alycia Lane, and the morals clause in her employment agreement that permitted CBS to fire her after being making headlines herself one too many times.

Human Capitalist also posts a great YouTube video demonstrating just why sports figures should have “risk avoidance” provisions in their contracts.

For more on this topic, see our earlier post, Bad Boys, Bad Boys, Whatcha’ Gonna Do When They Work for You?, which discusses morals clauses in employment contracts.

You may find this hard to believe but I am about to use the words “S.E.C.” and “cool” in the same sentence. It’s true. The U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission has an interesting (read: cool) new online tool. It’s Executive Pay Finder allows you to search SEC filings to find out how much and in what form the nation’s top executives are being compensated. There are currently 500 companies included in the database. The SEC explains the tool:

This interactive tool is designed to illustrate some of the ways that interactive data can improve the quality and usability of executive compensation disclosure. It relies on interactive data tags that were applied by the Commission to the summary executive compensation disclosure in the public filings of 500 large companies for 2006.

The tool allows you to search for a specific company, by revenue, or even by industry. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg for its search capabilities. Once you find the company or companies that interest you, the tool actually gives you the capability to compile them into a single table for comparison purposes and then, you can even send your data to a Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet, create charts and graphs, Oh my!!!

For those of you who may be working on a compensation audit or getting ready to revamp your pay structure, this tool may provide some helpful insight. For the rest of us, it’s just plain interesting cool!