Quitting a job for a better offer is a time-tested method of securing a pay raise, improved working conditions or both.

Now a national backlash is building against employers that make such movement harder with noncompete agreements that bar departing employees from taking jobs with industry competitors for certain periods of time. That’s good news for workers, because eliminating barriers to job-hopping could help stir the kind of wage growth workers haven’t seen since before the last recession.

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Noncompete clauses “severely impact low-wage workers, who are working in those [low-wage] industries because they don’t have alternatives,” said Ronald Gilson, professor of law at Columbia and Stanford universities who has researched the topic. Among such workers, the agreements have “no other purpose than to restrict competition in the market for employees,” he said.