Would these contractual terms stand up in a court of law (US)? I was recently reviewing the contents of a contract agreement (US Based company) when two parts struck me as being particularly harsh. The parts of stick out to me in particular are: Clause 3: "Therefore agrees that during or after the term of this Agreement" – How can a company stipulate a condition after an agreement finished and over. Surely there must be a limit or it will be enforceable for the duration of the persons life. Clause 4: "If any court refuses to enforce this Agreement, or any provision hereof, because it is more extensive (as to time, definition of business of otherwise) than is necessary to protect the business and goodwill of the Company, Employee agrees that this agreement, or the offending provision hereof, shall be modified to the extent necessary to permit the terms to be enforced in any such legal proceeding" – This seems to state that even if a court decides that some parts are not enforceable, we reserve the right to change them until we can get damages from you in any way. This sounds very harsh. (Full image of the specific clauses are here and here.) I was wondering if: These statements would stand up in a court of law? Whether companies are allowed to make these types of statements? Whether employees have the right to push back and ask these to be changed?
Yes Yes Yes However, these are pretty standard contract terms. Many, many terms survive the end of the substantive agreement. For example, terms with respect to ongoing confidentiality, dispute resolution, warranties, termination itself etc. The second is so common it actually has a named legal doctrine: reading down. In the absence of such a clause, if the contract inadvertently exceeds what the law allows, it preserves the contract rather than leaving both parties without contractural protection.
Severability My understand [sic] of contract law in general, is that an illegal or unenforceable clause does not render the whole contract void, but rather that specific clause is essentially stricken out, as if it did not exist. This is not true. Or, at least, not necessarily true. The courts, when interpreting a contract, try to give effect to the parties intentions. Or, more precisely, what an impartial, reasonable person would conclude their intentions at the time were based on the evidence. A contract is a set of mutual promises - if one of those promises is unenforceable, was it the parties intention that: the remainder be enforced, or absent that promise, they would not have made a deal, or they would have made a different deal, say, at a different price? It’s hard to make general statements about severability because they turn on the particular facts of each case. However, the common law doctrine is that severance means severance - you can take words out, but you can’t add words in or change the meaning of words you left behind. If doing that leaves nonsense, then the clause can’t be severed, and the whole contract is void. Further, what’s left must still be a contract. If the severed portion leaves a remainder that does not meet the requirements of a contract (e.g. because the severance totally removed one party’s consideration), then the whole contract is void. Similarly, if the severed item is central to the purpose of the contract, then the whole contract is void. Finally, at least in Common Law countries, there is a difference between provisions that are unenforcable (e.g. unfair restraint of trade clauses) and those that are illegal (e.g. your murder before resignation clause). In most jurisdictions, if a provision is unenforcable at common law or through statute, severability is an option. However, if the provision is illegal, then responses differ. In England and Wales, a provision that requires criminality or the commission of a tort cannot be severed - the illegality 'infects' the entire contract and makes the whole thing void. However, in Australia, the degree of illegality matters - heinous illegality infects the entire contract, but incidental illegality may not. For example, see REW08 Projects Pty Ltd v PNC Lifestyle Investments PTY LTD [2017] NSWCA 269 [23 October 2017] - the NSW Court of Appeal ruled that a property sale that contained clauses designed (by both parties) to defraud the state of Stamp Duty was nevertheless enforceable against the vendor - this would likely have been decided the other way in England and Wales. Of course, many contracts make express provision for unenforcable terms in what are known as severability clauses. These can go further than mere severance and allow the court to add words or even redraft entire sections to preserve the contract. However, this is not a panacea because what you agreed to in your severability clause may not be what you thought you agreed to when the rubber hits the road. For example, when you are forced to sell your Picasso for the 1,000USD deposit only, and you can't get the 100,000,000,000 Iranian Rial balance due to US sanctions. Therefore, deliberately leaving unenforcable provisions in a contract is dangerous because you don't know what you are going to get. However, is it unlawful? Well, that depends. There is nothing wrong with making legally unenforceable agreements. You and I can agree to go to the movies this Thursday. That's an unenforcable social arrangement, not a contract. If you stand me up, I can't sue you even if I bought popcorn for you. Similarly, there is no prohibition on having unenforcable terms in an otherwise legally binding contract, particularly if everyone knows they are unenforcable. Indeed, many large contracts are accompanied by Memorandums of Understanding that are unenforcable statements about how various organisations intend to work together to give effect to the contract. However, if the term is included to be deceptive or misleading by one party against the other (intentionally or otherwise), there may be legal consequences. A person who was misled into entering a contract may be able to have that contract declared void. Also, many jurisdictions make misleading and deceptive conduct in trade or commerce an offence.
are contract terms enforceable that say the employee has to pay the employer if they leave without giving notice? Yes, as long as the penalization is not of punitive nature. The doctrine of at-will employment is only the default condition, but a contract may supersede it. As for the extra question, reciprocity of sanctions (as in leaving without notice) is not a requirement for enforceability of a contract. In general, the lack of reciprocity only signals that there is a difference in the parties' bargaining power, but usually that does not affect enforceability.
Generally, what you say you will do in a contract is what you must do - there is no "the dog ate my homework" excuse. For your examples: Employment contracts have so much government regulation that the common law contract is lost in the mists of time. It is unlikely that a court would interpret an employment contract as requiring exact timekeeping; it is also unlikely that the person would have worked exactly 38 hours on every week except the one where they worked 37.5. However, if it were proved that the employee owed 0.5 hours to the employer they could be required to provide it or refund the pay they had received, barring a law that changed this. The dog must be walked. Alice must find a substitute walker if she is unable to provide it. Falling sick is something foreseeable that Alice should have provided for either in the contract ("if I am sick I won't walk the dog") or by arranging for someone else to do it. For purely personal services, falling sick may frustrate the contract, however, dog-walking is probably not personal enough. There is a doctrine which allows termination by frustration where neither party is at fault, however, it is not clear that this would apply. The building burning down is foreseeable and could (should?) have been addressed in the contract. If the destruction of the building was without fault on the owner then the contract is frustrated. If there was some fault on the owner (smoking in bed, inoperative fire alarm etc.) and the cleaner stands willing, ready and able (that is able except for the absence of a building) to perform their obligations, the owner would probably be obliged to pay, at the least for unrecoverable costs (e.g. wages) and loss of profits - if they pay for the cleaning products the cleaner would be obliged to deliver them up. One of the main reasons for the length of contracts for non-trivial transactions is they deal with these contingencies.
Excluding "ridiculously unacceptable conditions", it is legal to have "non-uniform" contract terms (where a company treats different classes of individuals differently), provided that the basis for distinction is not statutorily prohibited (race, religion, age, sex... depending on jurisdiction). There is a extremely slim chance that apparently legal income-discrimination can be a proxy for another form of illegal discrimination. However, "ridiculously unacceptable conditions" are unlikely to be found to be enforceable, regardless of any demographic properties associated with the condition. E.g. a clause requiring the surrender of a first-born female child would be unenforceable as "unconscionable". The specific circumstances surrounding such a finding by the court can't easily be summarized, since it relies heavily on prior case law, statutes, and legislative declarations. The underlying premise behind using the doctrine of unconsionability in such a case is that the clause in question is not something that a reasonable person would agree to, but they have no power to disagree. In the US, the case Williams v. Walker-Thomas Furniture is the leading case on this view. The clause in question was about a payment plan for furniture and the condition that no furniture could be paid off until all of it was. The consequence of the clause was that all of the furniture could be repossessed if any payment was missed, regardless of how much had already been paid. Various factors went into the court's ruling (that the condition was unenforceable), such as "absence of meaningful choice", "terms which are unreasonably favorable to the other party", :gross inequality of bargaining power". In the circumstance that you allude to, it is not obvious that the courts would follow Williams in making their ruling – it would depend on the extent to which one could reasonable conclude that the customer understood and freely accepted the term. There are upper limits on what a court can enforce, so a contract requiring a party to commit suicide would be utterly unenforceable (in most countries), and a contract requiring a party to break the law would be likewise.
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.
What do the contracts with your suppliers and the policy with your insurer say? Changes in government regulation do not ipso facto relieve Parties of the obligations under a contract under common (English) law. Contracts are allowed to allocate the risk of force majeure (and indeed, to define it because it has no common law meaning) but if they don’t, then each party bears their own risk and if they fail to honour their obligations they are in breach of contract. Common law does have the doctrine of frustration, however, that is much narrower and must result in the inability of the contract to be completed at all. And then there are consumer rights which may apply. When the dust settles, we are likely to see a lot of litigation around force majeure. Your venue appears to be complying with both the law and their obligations under the contract so you have no breach of contract claim against them and no trigger for the insurance policy. If you choose to cancel, then you broke the contract. Importantly, the position is reversed in civil law jurisdictions - a party unable to fulfil their obligations under a contract is not in breach.
Should I ask for a contract, when asking for the money? The proper time to define or formalize a contract is not when asking for the money, but when agreeing what tasks are expected from you and how much you will charge therefor. That way both parties will be clear on what is expected from each other. And if a dispute is brought to court, the fact-finder will have an objective document from which to identify who breached the contract. It is always recommendable that the contract be self-contained, and that relevant interactions between the parties be in writing or memorialized in some way that leaves no room for unverifiable allegations of the type &quot;I said, he said&quot;.