Can a person be fired for not agreeing to a contract at work? I have seen contracts (relating to employment) which contain terms like "by accepting this position you agree to sign an NDA that you will be provided on your first day of work". To my understanding these are unenforceable. Can a person be fired for refusing to agree to a contract? Assuming my above understanding is correct, does it make a difference if they had at any point agreed to agree to a contract? Often times when a person is hired there is an on boarding process which contains a bunch of paperwork. Hypothetically could a person refuse to sign it and not get penalized? There can be many (legitimate and illegitimate) reasons why someone must sign something relating to their employment. For example I was given the added responsibility to do work on the servers which were located in a rented secure building. This building had their own paperwork I needed to fill out for clearance purposes (like a background check). If I refused to do this could I have been fired?
An agreement to agree is void There is a multitude of case law on this point. If the NDA was not available to you when you signed the employment contract and the term was couched as you describe; then the term would be unenforcable. That is, your employment contract would be binding except for that term i.e. you could not be compelled to sign the NDA. Now, there may be a requirement on you to negotiate in good faith in an attempt to find an NDA you can agree to but if you can't find one you can't find one. You cannot (legally) be fired for this reason. Now, if the NDA was available, and you were told where to find it, and irrespective of if you did or didn't find it, you would be bound to the NDA.
Short Answer It might or might not be an anti-trust violations depending upon the states where the employers and employee are located. But, as a practical matter, it is almost impossible for an employee to prove an anti-trust violation without an insider leaking a "smoking gun" document or a company admitting to improper conduct, before a lawsuit is filed. Long Answer There is considerable regional variation regarding the extent to which legal arrangements to limit employee mobility are legal. For example, historically, Massachusetts is notorious for enforcing such limitations strictly. In contrast, California is famous for refusing to enforce such restrictions. In general, the Northeast is strict, the West is lenient and other states are in between, but it is really a state by state issue. (Incidentally, weak non-competition laws have been empirically shown by economists to be better for the economy in the sector where they might be applied but are not applied.) Usually these legal restrictions on employee mobility are imposed unilaterally by the employer without conferring with competitors, and sometimes remedies for a violation of these non-competition arrangements are limited to the employee and not the hiring company (although this is hardly universal - the intentional interference with contract tort historically arose to punish companies that induced employees to violate non-competes and duties of loyalty of existing employees of the suing firm). The anti-trust dimension comes from the agreement between competitors to honor each other's non-competition agreements, which is meaningful because in the states where Apple and Google are headquartered, non-competition agreements are basically unenforceable so this collusion between competitors has an effect in excess of the default legal situation in the absence of collusion. If Apple and Google had instead both been based in Boston instead, where their non-competition agreements were enforceable against both the employee and the new employer as a default rule of law, their agreement would probably not have violated anti-trust laws because they would simply be agreeing to follow the generally applicable law that would apply in the absence of a collusive agreement anyway. Thus, without knowing the default rules of law in the relevant states, and without knowing if there was actually an actual agreement between the competitors, you can't sue for an anti-trust violation. One of the recent revolutions in federal civil procedure, the Twombly case, arose in an anti-trust situation and held that a complaint for an anti-trust violation is not sufficient unless the person bringing suit has actual knowledge of the existence of a collusive agreement between competitors and does not merely infer the existence of such an agreement from the facts and circumstances available to the general public. It is not permissible to sue first and then use subpoenas and other pre-trial discovery procedures to determine if there was actually an express collusive agreement between the competitors rather than having their behavior arise for other reasons (since under Econ 101 microeconomic principles, marketwide price fixing by all participants and completely non-collusive perfect competition are indistinguishable as they both produce a uniform price in the marketplace for a good or service). Since this information is usually impossible to obtain prior to brining suit without an insider who leaks a smoking gun document, as a practical matter, it is usually impossible for an individual employee to prevail in an anti-trust lawsuit alleging collusion between competing firms. Under federal anti-trust laws, circumstances that have the de facto identical results to illegal collusion between competitors, where this is not actually collusion, are usually not actionable (i.e. you can't prevail in a lawsuit based upon those claims).
In the U.S. severance payments are not provided for statutorily, and are rarely made when an employee quits or is fired for cause. However, even when not provided for within contracts it is common to see voluntary severances paid during lay-offs. Furthermore, in the U.S. it is more likely that they would be "laid off" in order to qualify for unemployment insurance. In Pennsylvania one can make claims on the state-run unemployment insurance system only if one is able to work and does not refuse suitable work when offered. If one quits one is not eligible for these payments. Ultimately unemployment claims are born by the employer (since their legally-mandated unemployment insurance premiums are adjusted based on realized claims). So managers with the authority to layoff employees can impose real costs on their companies, both in terms of direct severance payments (which may be optional), and in terms of the inflated unemployment premiums that will hit the company down the road. However, I have never heard of a company attempting to recoup such costs from managers, since such decisions are specifically delegated to managers with hiring/firing authority. It seems much more likely that a manager deemed to have abused the company's purse would be demoted or fired rather than being sued, unless there were some gross fraud involved (e.g., kickbacks).
I see that most (all up to this point) answers and comments are made around if a verbal contract is binding enough for the employer to &quot;pursue back&quot; the extra payment that you received... but as far as I can see, they don't even need to consider the verbal agreement. Your employer thought (and apparently was right) that you were going to resign, so they offered you a payment raise in exchange for you to stay for two more years. You verbally agreed but this agreement was never written down nor signed by any of the parts, yet your employer respected it and for X amount of time you received more money that what your initial, written, signed contract says. Now you want to quit; as mentioned above, you only have your original contract, a contract that says two things that are key for this &quot;dilemma&quot;: The Employee will be paid £9/hr in arrears. Salary may be increased at the direction of The Employer subject to The Employee taking on additional responsibility which is agreed upon by both parties. If the Employer makes an overpayment to the Employee to which she is not entitled, or which is more than that to which she is entitled, the Employer has the right to recover the overpayment by deductions from the Employee's salary or from other payments due to them. You received payments for £11/hr, which is more that that to which you're entitled according to this (one and only) contract; so, your employer has the right to claim back those £2/hr that, officially, you were not entitled to. IF you want to argue that, as the 1st point says, both parties agreed to increase your salary for &quot;additional responsibilities&quot;, YOU would also have to admit that you agreed to stay for two more years, agreement that you are not complying to; so, once again, it's a point in favour for your employer. All in all, it all boils down to how your employeer &quot;feels&quot; when you present your resign letter; maybe they will just agree and let you go without further issues, but if they want to claim back that payment raise, IMO they have both the right AND the arguments to do so.
No First, there does not appear to be unlawful discrimination: there is nothing to suggest that you are a member of a protected class and were terminated because of that. Second, you were given no reason for your dismissal so your employer is not claiming you were terminated for just cause. So, in BC, an employer &quot;can end an employee's job by giving written working notice or pay&quot; and this is perfectly legal. For someone who worked for &quot;about 6 months&quot;, the notice/pay period is 1 week. So either they must give you 1 weeks work or pay you 1 weeks wages.
No The contract is created at the moment that an offer was accepted. In normal circumstances: You accepted an offer that they made to the general public by sending a purchase order for specific items at specific prices, or They accepted your offer by communicating their acceptance to you (being advised that the goods have been dispatched counts). However, in this circumstance, the company has been explicit that the contract is only created when either: You checkout and pay, or They “supply an invoice to you.” It appears that neither event happened so there is no contract. Their specific terms have overridden the common law rules on offer and acceptance (as they are allowed to do) and the offer has not been accepted until you receive their invoice. Specifically, it cannot be accepted by performance (dispatching the goods) and the requirement for the invoice to be supplied overrides the postal rule. Note that, in this case, you got lucky. 99 times out of 100 there would have been a valid contract and you would have breached it. In future, cancel orders specifically, don’t make assumptions.
Generally you can back-date the effective date of a contract. Texas does not have any specific laws that prohibit it and in contracts law, this concept is called the "relation back" theory of contract effectiveness. See Grubb &amp; Ellis Co. v. Bradley Real Est. Trust, 909 F.2d 1050, 1054 (7th Cir. 1990) for an explanation that back dating violates no general contract law principles and is "determined by the intent of the parties as deduced from the instrument itself." Aside from the obvious issues where someone is back-dating a contract to commit some type of fraud, back-dating raises a whole host of unforeseen consequences with regards to a party's performance under the contract as well as the rights of third parties. The best practice is to make it clear that the effective date and the execution date are different. This avoids confusion and ambiguity that could call the enforceability of the contract into question. Some of the issues that arise when back-dating a NDA are: Liability for disclosures the employee made between the effective date and when the contract is executed/signed. This is particularly troublesome if the NDA provides for liquidated damages or imposes other penalties. If the effective date and execution date are not clear, there might not be a “meeting of the minds.” (The essential elements of a contract are offer, acceptance, consideration, and meeting of the minds.) This is a problem for the employer more than the employee. Liability to third parties. Say an employer licensed some technology from a third party and everyone working on the project was required to sign NDAs. Employer could be on the hook here. Also, the employer and employee could both be in trouble if they were back-dating the contract to trick the third party into thinking it had been signed all along. The issue here is fraud. So, the bottom-line is that is generally legal/enforceable, but one should have a clear explanation for the difference in the dates.
The question is a bit sparse on relevant details, but yes, a EULA is binding, even when you agree in the course of employment. It may not be you who is bound, though. In case 1, you install a program at word to do something, the EULA says "don't copy any of these files", you see a cool file and decide "Neat, I'm taking a copy home. I can do this because I installed the program at work and am not bound by the EULA". Wrong. Case 2: you are installing software on behalf of a customer. It's not you that is bound by the EULA, it's the customer. Case 3: you work for the company that develops the software and holds the copyright, either fixing bugs or testing the security of the system by trying to crack it. In that case, you have special permission from the copyright holder that overrides whatever restrictions would normally from from the EULA. I don't know if that covers the kind of case you are concerned with. To reduce the matter to a simple sentence, just because you agree to something in the course of a job does not mean that the agreement is invalid.