Relative vs constant salary in US Employee and contract law So I was listening to mathematician and economist Eric Weinstein, and he told an anecdote about salary in a hyper-inflationary economy. In the story, the employee and employer argue over the "fair" compensation as it relates to inflation(then further tied to Gauge theory but that is not relevant), where the employee states salary should be derived from the real spending power of the currency. Would the argument of salary derivative wrt purchasing power(or relative value) hold any water if the notion of constant salary is not explicitly stated? Or is it just implicitly assumed? Would this question differ for a contractor?
In practice this is rarely done in the US. There have been cases of employment contracts with automatic increases tied to the CPI (Consumer Price Index) or some other measure of inflation -- I believe at one time a number of union contracts specified this. Employer and employee could certainly agree on any such formula. But in the absence of any explicit provision for such a link, and an agreed formula for the resulting salary, I think a stated salary would be interpreted as a fixed sum, not subject to change until an explicit change is made. Fixed wages are the almost invariable custom, and in the absence of any explicit provision for an automatic inflationary change, I think a court would assume a fixed amount, if it came to a court case.
If you want to protect yourself or any property interests you may have in this circumstance you have to talk to a lawyer. You cannot get (or trust) legal advice from the internet. I will, however, make the following personal observations: I only provide a W-9 to people who are paying me money, and who request it as a condition of paying me. I don't know of a legal requirement to supply it after the fact. However, not providing it to someone who did pay you more than $600 in a tax year could certainly make it difficult for them to comply with their tax filing obligations. I do not sign any agreements, assignments, or contracts, without what I consider to be fair consideration. E.g., if on leaving a job (as has happened) I am asked by a former employer to sign something that I am not already obligated to sign due to some prior contract, then I negotiate what is commonly called a "severance package." They pay me and/or extend benefits, and I sign something that limits their liability.
You certainly can claim whatever you want. Will you be granted it though? Time is money indeed, and replacing the damaged items requires some time not just items themselves. The question is how much time and at what rate? Your duty will be to mitigate the damages and so to minimise the time and its cost. Will your normal hourly rate be applicable? Only if you have to use your actual work time and miss out on earning for those hours. It will probably be unreasonable to use work time in the first place, let alone that you may not necessarily miss out any earnings in case it's a salaried job and your boss is fine to just let you go for a few hours to sort out personal issues. If the time you use for replacement is evenings/weekends then you would need to quantify how much you miss out on not doing what you would do otherwise.
Law (regardless of its type) supersedes contract, provided it has jurisdiction over the persons bound by that contract. Contract provisions that are counter to law are generally held to be void. State law has authority over an employer's policies or hand book. However, there may be exceptions in state law (so I would double check). A frequent exception (at least in California law, which I am most familiar with) is for very small businesses. Another exception, from C.R.S. § 8-4-101(5), is if you are considered a "contractor" rather than an employee, per the government's determination. It is possibly worth your time to let you employer know of this conflict before termination if possible, so that they can adjust their policies, rather than in an adversarial position after termination, if only to avoid the headache.
Your framing of the issue is basically wrong. There is an exemption, which varies from state to state, from unsecured creditors (but not creditors that take the goods as collateral) in bankruptcy and in debt collection outside of bankruptcy (not always the same exemption), for tangible personal property owned by the debtor which constitutes the debtor's tools of the trade, but that varies from state to state, is a creature of state statute (and the bankruptcy code), is not universal, and is usually limited in dollar amount. Moreover, the exemption only applies when the tradesman actually owns the tools of his trade which is customary in some professions, but not automatic. It is only the case when the tradesman buys his own tools. There is no generic v. non-generic distinction. In the software field, education and the public domain can always be accessed. But, intellectual property, that can be protected, that is developed for the employer, is usually work for hire and belong to the employer. This default rule is subject to the terms of the agreements between the parties entered into contractually.
Assumed: United States jurisdiction, no discrimination component to your experiences. There is not a legal limit on how much time an employer requires you to be in another city so long as the employer is complying with wage and hour laws, family leave laws, and the like. They may be in violation of their employment contract with you if the contract specified that you were being hired for a position in one city. A four-week trip does not sound like "time travelling" to me, it sounds like a temporary posting in another city. Similarly, depending on how well the contract is drafted, the state whose law governs the employment, and the company's other behavior you may be able to sue them using material misrepresentation or fraudulent statements about the position you would be taking. If you want more insight into whether you might have a case, take your contract to an attorney. In practice, however, the solution is almost certainly not a lawsuit. The solution may be to start looking for a new job, to communicate better with your boss, or to figure out how much money it would take to keep you working doing the job you are actually doing rather than the one you were hired to do, and to negotiate a salary increase. Try posting your question with a few more facts over at workplace.stackexchange.com for more insight into how to deal with the problem professionally.
Caveat: This answer applies to private sector union workers in the U.S. The considerations that apply to public sector unions are very different. Also, as I discuss below, there are special labor relations law rules that apply to a few specific private sector industries that are pertinent to these questions. The legal framework largely flows out of the National Labor Relations Act and the cases decided under it by the National Labor Relations Board (which is the first instance trial court in most union-management disputes), the U.S. Courts of Appeal for the various circuits, and the U.S. Supreme Court. But, I have not cited chapter and verse of particular statutory sections and cases supporting this analysis for lack of space and time (it would normally take up about a third of a one semester law school class on labor law to cover the points summarily answered below). What are the lawful requirements of Company A in bargaining? There is an obligation to negotiate in good faith and to make available some information necessary to allow that to be possible. The employer also can't fire an employee for insisting on negotiations in good faith with the union or for union activity. Is there a minimal salary that must be offered (apart from minimum wage laws)? No. Also, in some industries, the employer needs to pay the &quot;prevailing wage&quot; in order to get government contract which are critical to its business and basically amount to the union negotiated wage at comparable firms. What happens if Company A and the union do not agree to terms? There is no collective bargaining agreement and the employer's terms are in force when the existing collective bargaining agreement expires. Usually, if this happens, the workers then go on strike rather than working under the unilaterally employer imposed contract terms, until a new collective bargaining agreement is negotiated (and the vast majority of the time, a new collective bargaining agreement is negotiated after some period of time when the workers are on strike). But, sometimes a prior collective bargaining agreement will establish an arbitration resolution if there is a deadlock. Arbitration is also used to resolve deadlocks, if I recall correctly, in a few key industries with large employers where avoiding a strike is critical to the nation's economy (outside the jurisdiction of the National Labor Relations Act) that are established by statute. Can company A elect to hire people from outside the union &quot;at-will&quot; while negotiating with the union? Yes. These people are often pejoratively called &quot;scabs&quot; and neutrally called &quot;replacement workers&quot;. Generally speaking, when a strike is over, the business has to take back all of the striking workers, and fire all of the replacement workers, except to the extent that the business whose workers went on strike had vacancies when the strike started. In part, this is because this is a term of the new collective bargaining agreement and in part as a consequence of the requirement that employers not retaliate against employees for union activities. In states that are not &quot;right to work&quot; states, the union can prevent non-union replacement workers from being hired at all after the strike is over. Could Company A continue to do so indefinitely, essentially no longer employing the union members and just hiring a new group? More or less. I can't easily summarize the case law on the point and prior collective bargaining agreement terms can be relevant. Also, there are a few sectors of the economy (mostly the stage play industry, the movie industry, and the construction industry), in which unionization is structured on the basis of professions for an entire industry, or the entire industry in a geographical region, rather than on an employer by employer basis. This tactic doesn't work in those industries. The common thread is that work in these industries is organized on a project by project basis (i.e. a particular play, a particular movie, or a particular construction project), in which the firm paying for the project is usually a single project only entity. Another important bright line rule is that an employer always has the right to shut down the business covered by the union entirely, rather than deal with the union. But, this is why unions tend to be more effective in industries with large employers who can't replace the employees very easily with non-union workers (like factories and ship yards, and grocery store chains). Is this basically saying that the only power unions ultimately have is to quite en masse and make it difficult for the company to hire replacements? Basically. But, the power to strike is considerable in most unionized employment contexts and many people won't &quot;cross a picket line&quot; in solidarity with striking workers. From a consumer's perspective, not crossing a picket line means not patronizing a business whose workers are on strike. But, not crossing a picket line can also mean that workers (usually at a unionized business that is a vendor to the business whose worker's are on strike, or that deliver things to the business whose worker's are on strike) will refuse to participate in doing business with the business whose worker's are on strike. So, even if enough replacement workers can be found to continue to operate the business, this doesn't necessarily mean that a business won't face very severe consequences for continuing to operate with replacement workers while its regular workers are on strike. Furthermore, unions can take other actions short of strikes, like staying on the job and &quot;working to rule&quot; strictly refusing to show any flexibility beyond the bare requirements of their existing contract or the new one, or pursuing every single minor bump and scratch as a worker's compensation claim, reporting every Occupational Safety and Health Administration violation, or pursuing unfair labor practices litigation against the employer. Private sector unions are declining, in part, due to the ability of employers to hire replacement workers. Still, this is one reason for the long and steady decline of unionization in the private sector U.S. labor market (although the trend has reversed a bit in the last several years). Consider, for example, the following chart (via Wikipedia): As I recapped the economic history of labor action in the American workforce as of December 2010: [There have been] six general strikes in U.S. history, one in 1919 in Seattle, and four in 1934, at the height of the Great Depression, one in Toledo, one in Minneapolis, one in San Francisco and one at West Coast Ports. There was also a general strike in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico in 1998. The last one in the English Speaking United States was 76 years ago, and very few people living today remember it. The United States has never had a nationwide general strike and just two general strikes in its history, one restricted to a single industry, and the other to a U.S. territory, extended beyond a single city. Union-management relations in the United States used to look a lot like they do in Europe. Strikes were large, frequent and involved a large share of the work force. National guard forces or private security forces were frequently called in to put them down in bloody conflicts. Openly socialist political parties were organized. In 1950, a year that revisionist history remembers as a tranquil period in American history, there were 424 strikes involving 1,000 or more workers, in all involving 1,698,000 workers, which was more than one in nine members of the unionized workforce of 14.3 million workers who made up 31.5% of the total work force. In 2008, there were 15 strikes involving 1,000 or more workers, in all including 72,000 workers which was one in two-hundred and twenty-three members of the unionized workforce of 16.1 million workers who made up 12.4% of the total workforce. The public sector which is 36.8% unionized, is as unionized as the private sector was at its peak. The private sector, which is 7.2% unionized, has the lowest level of unionization in the private sector since the 1920s, if not earlier. The unionized workforce has remained more or less constant for half a century, despite a growing workforce, and that masks the fact that there has been substantial growth in public sector union membership and a substantial decline in private sector union membership over that time period. The United States, there has been only one year since 1983 that more than 3% of unionized workers went on strike (1986), and there has only been one year since 1998 (the year 2000) when more than one in eighty union members went on strike. In the entire United States from 1990 to 2008, there wasn't a single year that there were more than 45 strikes involving 1,000 or more workers in the entire United States, in a period that started with a labor force of 103 million workers and peaked at just short of 130 million workers. In contrast, there wasn't a single year from 1950 to 1987 that had less than 46 strikes, despite that fact that the workforce was significantly smaller. Prior to the 1980s there were a couple hundred major strikes in the United States per year, about ten times current levels of labor action. I updated this account in 2014 and 2015: There were thirteen major strikes that took place at least in part in 2015 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics monthly tables. This is just two more than in the year 2014, which had fewer major strikes which involved fewer workers than any year from 1947-2013 except 2009, a low point of the financial crisis. Most of the half century before WWII also had more major strikes (at least proportionate to the size of the population) than there are these days. In all of the United States in 2014, there were just 11 strikes involve 1,000 or more workers, which involved a total of 34,000 workers and resulted in 200,000 work-days idle, which was less than 0.01% (i.e. less than 1 day in 10,000) of the total working time of the American labor force. The year 2015 was the next most peaceful year in post-WWII labor history. The year 2010 also had just 11 major strikes, but those strikes involved more workers and produced more days idle. There were just 5 major strikes in 2009 in the United States which involved fewer workers than in 2014 and fewer days idle. This has a lot to do with the decline of private sector unions in the United States. . . . Just under half of union members are in the public sector and public sector unions, as a rule in the United States, have limited or non-existent rights to strike (although teachers unions which are a huge part of total number of public sector union members can frequently strike). In 2014, just 0.001% of the working time of the American labor was idle due to strikes or lockouts. The last year than more than 0.01% of the working time of the American labor force was idle was 2000. The last year that 0.10% or more of the working tie of the American labor force was idle was 1978. Only one year from 1948 to 1959, a time often nostalgically remembered as the &quot;good old days&quot; by conservatives was below the 0.10% threshold. Nationally, in 2014, the private sector 6.6% (7.4%) of employees were members of unions (represented by unions), while in the public sector 35.7% (39.2%) of employees were members of unions (represented by unions), with both percentages generally tending to fall over the previous decade. Within the public sector, nationally, union representation rates are highest with local government employees (45.5%), intermediate with state government employees (32.8%), and lowest with federal employees (31.6%). In the United States in the year 2020 the union membership rate (the percentage of wage and salary workers who were members of unions) was 10.8 percent. . . . the union membership rate in the public sector was 34.8 percent, while the rate in the private sector was 6.3 percent.
First Part OR 324 is quite the right article for this. If the employer doesn't want that you work (because he has nothing to do for you) it's his problem, not yours. He still has to pay if you are there and ready to do work. This is for instance also mentioned in this article. The meaning of this is obvious if having a contract with a fixed number of work hours per day/month/year. Second part Prove that you have a fixed work contract. If the shift plans are made in advance you have a proof that you have a certain number of hours to work (and thus an expected income). If I interpret this here correctly, this is &quot;echte Arbeit auf Abruf&quot; (true work on request), because if your employer wants your work, you have to be there according to the shift plan, as opposed to your employer asking &quot;who is ready to work tonight?&quot;. So your employer must pay you the hours agreed on in the shift plan, regardless of whether he has work for you or not (but you must explicitly tell him that you are willing to take work). Third part Can the employer change the shift plan, and to what extent? The employer must announce changes to work hours as soon as possible, and changes on short notice are only acceptable in emergency cases. A reduction in work hours due to not enough work shall not reduce the employee's salary. The business risk is entirely with the employer and he must not shift that responsibility to his employees. (That was common in the late 19th and early 20th century, with all the officially self-employed home workers in the textile industry). Here is a federal court decision that affirms this (BGE 125 III 65 S. 66).