All. The. Time. Legal paperwork is "it's just standard required legal blahblahblah, just sign it" right up until there's a dispute, and then it might as well have been signed in blood.
A job I worked at required that I acknowledge having received and read a pamphlet on sexual harassment in the workplace. My understanding is that it is a requirement of the state of CA that employers distribute such a pamphlet. The state even has a stock pamphlet that fulfills the requirement, though employers are free to substitute their own. My employer wanted me to acknowledge that I'd received the one via the HR website … except the link caused 500 Internal Server Errors.
I reported this, and even noted that if the link just goes to the standard pamphlet [and I linked to that] that we could consider the defect in the website "cured" and I could sign and life could move on. That part of the message got ignored, of course; the people responsible for the HR site are like "well it works for us?", and of course there's still pressure to sign a statement that I've read this thing.
All of that after I explicitly asked for any and all paperwork that would require my signature up front before becoming an employee. (This was, of course, not included in what I was given prior to starting.)
> All of that after I explicitly asked for any and all paperwork that would require my signature up front before becoming an employee. (This was, of course, not included in what I was given prior to starting.)
I'd be interested in what would happen if you pushed hard on this point. Giving people surprise contracts after they have quit their previous job, moved their family and acquired a new house should not be acceptable.
Unfortunately, pushing hard (as in, "I will not sign this since it was not given to me pre-employment") might actually get you booted. Companies routinely update policies and a refusal to comply with those, even created post-hiring, may be sufficient for termination.
If what you mean is "this policy sounds reasonable, but I cannot sign anything sight unseen" any reasonable HR will just print (scan / email) you a copy of anything they want you to sign. My 2c.
The first part is totally reasonable. If the company wants to change policies and you don't agree to those policies (and are in no way able to change them), why should they let you stay? Why should you let yourself stay? If a new policy is that egregious that you would rather possibly lose your job than sign in agreement, why would you even want to stay there? At that point, it's in everyone's best interests to part ways before it becomes a real issue.
If the company actually cares about keeping you and they have any sort of leeway as to changing the policy, they will listen to why you can't agree to it.
> If the company actually cares about keeping you and they have any sort of leeway as to changing the policy, they will listen to why you can't agree to it.
I agree in spirit, but I suspect this would almost never happen: companies who care and track employee signatures on a bunch of HR policies tend to be large and inflexible (smaller companies would often make some blanket blurb "thou must read and comply to policies that you can find <here>" and move on -- they have technologies to develop).
There's two parts, I think, to the parent's point.
Using your leverage as an employer to change the terms of the agreement immediately after the agreement has been made is unacceptable. It might be legal¹, but that doesn't make it right. And when you present subsequent legal agreements after I've started my employment that I "must" sign when I explicitly asked for them up front (and even when my employment agreement states that this is "the entire agreement" too!) — I mean, the company might as well put on their best impression of Darth Vader "pray I do not alter it further".
There's also the point about asking for HR to send you a copy. I actually did that in the case above, and it just never happened; HR wants you to go through the website, for everything. It's incredible how dead set some people can be, because "that's the system"! The entire thing was inane, and so fell by the wayside, and was forgotten about. About a year later, someone new took over, audited their predecessor, found out I hadn't signed, and sent an email "Hey, we noticed you never signed that you've read the pamphlet, can you sign?" and attached the pamphlet as a PDF to that email. Since that rectified the error (I now had a copy of the pamphlet) a signature was given and life went on.
¹IANAL. I honestly don't think "we won't fire you" should be valid as consideration in a contract. Thus, such agreements lack consideration, so they're not valid contracts, signature or not. I think some Canadian courts have agreed with this, but alas, I'm not in Canada. I'm still at-will, so IDK if it really matters per se, given what at-will is.
I am likewise not a lawer but wouldn't your wagers be consideration? I mean "You give me money and I do a thing for you". Is pretty standard as contracts go.
Yes, in the original agreement wages are absolutely the consideration. The point is here is that — all too often IME — companies will, shortly after you start, ask for another signature on an additional agreement, giving them (the company) additional things. The sexual harassment pamphlet example is mild (and more about me not signing something falsely rather than a bad deal), but I've also seen IP agreements and stock agreements after the fact.
If you consider only what has changed from the original agreement: the company gets whatever it is you're signing the document for. You typically get nothing, aside from getting to keep your job. It's in this second agreement that I just don't find a compelling argument that "keep your job" (i.e., wages) suffices as "consideration". If you do, it's effectively reneging on the original deal, and trying to replace it with a new one that's not as good for the employee. Meanwhile, the employee has likely left their previous employment, and is at a huge disadvantage to walk away at this point. Particularly so when a prospective employee asks for anything that requires a signature up front, and when the documents in question use legalese like "this is the entire agreement". After that, there shouldn't be any more agreements unless something actually changes.
Those people get the documents. I've never been in a job that required me to sign something that I couldn't see. When it doesn't work, you say no. People are too afraid to say no.
“It’s just standard whatever” is really fun when you want a change and you have all the leverage. It’s hilarious to watch the tune change when you say you just won’t sign in that case. Alas, I’ve only been in this position once.
I've once been in that situation where the company tried to introduce a contract rewrite with the standard lack of clarity over whether it applied to everything, including outside work (e.g. open source contributions). There were enough open source developers in the company that this was a big problem.
So we all just refused to sign the contract change.
The situation stalled for a few months, and they eventually backed down and wrote in a clarification. This was the UK, so we actually had rights and couldn't just be arbitrarily sacked, and everyone was aware that pursuing individuals over this would lead to a mass exodus and the destruction of the company.
Not protected in the formal sense, but the old one still applied with its month's notice in both directions. Really the key factor was the difficulty in replacing developers.
Had to quit the company I worked at for 4-5 years after the owner died his wife took over - and tried to force non competes that were forever and transferable if the business was sold etc..
The contract was so broad there was no way it was valid. The kicker was she was withholding my standard'ish larg'ish bonus. I just walked and finally she came around - took years for us to mend our relationship.
I actually don't mind signing unenforceable contracts.
You don't have to say anything, life can be like a game of poker. If your perception of reality is correct, you gain outsize influence, if it is incorrect (or more specifically "can't gain consensus") then you are poor or are imprisoned or killed. Do you gain a benefit by informing someone else about their perception of reality?
I primarily try to be rich enough to exercise my perception of reality in appeals court, because thats the only place it really matters.
In a lot of situations where a contract like that comes to court, the company will try to convince the judge to simply reduce the scope of the contract to whatever seems reasonable to them - and this can succeed. (Of course if you're in a state where non-competes are blanket illegal, that's different.)
I do the same thing. It's not even necessary to be especially rich in most cases, so long as you took the time to read the relevant statutes and case law in advance. An hour on a search engine is often enough.
Oh yeah on day 3, she said come in and we'll talk... Talked for 2 hours and she was still stuck on the contract.
Finally I told her 'I feel like that check your holding is already mine' - aka your on the verge of theft..
I immediately spent the next month negotiating the bonus into the base pay. Took a few years to regain trust and now I'm at a glass ceiling (which I won't complain about but feel fortunate about)
In employee-employer relationships, the employer typically has all the power, so if you refuse to sign, you will likely be terminated. This comes up all the time with signing NDAs, copyright assignment policies, anti-moonlighting policies... you have to sign it or you’re gone. I’ve tried the cute “strike out the clauses you don’t like” trick and in every case, Legal got back to me in a few days with a stern “Sign it unmodified or GTFO.”
I also remember a company that I worked for where every week, you had to sign a paper showing you worked 8 hours each day for a total of 40 hours, regardless of whether you actually worked more or less. This was for a salaried position with no overtime so it didn’t really affect my compensation. I tried correcting the numbers and HR said you can’t change them. I pointed out that I’d be lying if I signed it unmodified and the response was I’d be terminated if I didn’t sign. So, of course I signed it but it seemed like such a pointless exercise.
I once accepted an offer and the next day I put in my 2 week notice at my new job, and later the same day I found out from a press release that the my new employer was being acquired.
A year or so into the new job, the CEO emailed everyone in the company a restrictive NDA, non-compete, non-solicitation contract and told everyone to sign it. It included language about theft of company forms or documents among other things.
I looked at the metadata of the contract doc and the "company" tag was the CEO's previous employer. Which told me that the CEO "stole" the doc from his previous company, and was asking everyone to sign something saying they wouldn't do the same.
Because of that I decided not to sign it. Several other colleagues refused it too. No one was terminated, but there was a large staff exodus shortly after who were solicited by another former employee. I stayed on another 6 months to finish a project but left after that to join my former coworkers.
I would have been open to signing if I was compensated for it, but that option wasn't on the table, and I wasn't willing to restrict my future ability to find work with no benefit to me.
Lesson learned: Reusing legal forms from old companies can cost a lot more than a proper lawyer review would have cost. Don't take shortcuts when signing OR asking people to sign a legal document.
As a counterpoint to this, a few years back I was freelancing for a fairly well known startup. My first day on site their lawyer gave me a contract with a clause saying something to the effect of if the company found my work unsatisfactory I would redo it free of charge. I brought this up to the lawyer and he immediately agreed he wouldn't sign something similar (also that he was surprised that I actually read the contract since it was otherwise fairly standard). He struck it out and we both initialed.
No issues came up but I've since felt vindicated in doing a close reading of anything more important than an EULA.
Arguably that's a bit different though. If I hire a contractor to do a job (whether construction or software) for a fixed price and they do a sub-standard job, it's really not unreasonable to expect that they'll correct deficiencies prior to final payment. (If I'm paying them hourly and there are no other conditions in the contract, then it's probably on me though.)
Usually contracts with a do-over clause like that also include very specific, objective measures of what makes a job sub-standard (like not being able to pass certain engineering inspections, in the case of construction jobs). A contract that just says "I can make you re-do this work if I'm subjectively unhappy" is insane.
Things tend to be more formalized in a business context but my experience with contractors, etc. at home is that it's often pretty loose, at least for relatively small things.
There's quite a big difference between voluntarily making a few tweaks to something to keep your client happy, and giving them a legally enforceable right to unlimited and uncompensated re-work until they're satisfied.
Satisfaction clauses like that are the thing I always tell my contractor friends to look for. No sane person would agree to it but the corporate lawyers often manage to sneak it in.
It’s usually enforceable but it’s also almost always negotiable.
Careful, the surprise may be fake, because it was struck out and you both had to initial--if it was so weird, why did they just not give you a new copy that didn't have the clause?
I don’t understand what you mean, can you clarify? What is the difference between striking out vs printing a new contract, and why is one choice or the other correlated with the surprise being fake?
I suppose theoretically one could imagine a malicious company having a contract with language that is favorable to the employee, and then striking that out after the employee has already signed, with the intent to claim that the employee signed with knowledge of the struck clauses. But then again, if contracts were ever intended to be the end-all of legal dispute then one would think they'd use something less easily forgeable than mere initialing.
The lawyer was surprised that someone actually read the contract, not that the contract contained a satisfaction clause. The lawyer was probably already aware that the clause was there, and it's a standard contract that they use for all contractors.
I was in exactly this situation at UTMB Galveston around 2002ish. I ended up in a room with the manager who decided to implement the policy & one of the hospital's lawyers. The lawyer was patiently explaining to the incoherently-sobbing manager that:
1. UTMB Galveston was indemnified from her mistakes by her employment contract;
2. She owed me something like 60000$ in unpaid compensation, and that the State of Texas would probably penalize her another 250-500k$; and,
3. A cursory investigation showed that there was probably another several million in fines & compensation, outstanding in the complaint, that she would have to pay.
We "settled" with an official apology, an official write up in her permanent record, & a change in policy. (She quietly "left" shortly thereafter.)
If you have to track your hours to be paid (or not terminated), then you are by definition not a salaried employee: you are hourly. The way the FLSA works is it asks how the employer treats the employee — if you're treated like you're salaried, then you're salaried. Legally, there's no notion of 'salary' and 'hourly' outside of this. (Ignoring all the real complexities of the law.)
Requiring an hourly worker to falsify statements of hourly work is a serious crime. The repercussions are pretty crazy.
For a low-level manager? That's insane and I'd be shocked to see that hold up in court.
I wouldn't. In the United States, you don't screw with labor law. Pay your employees late a couple of times, and if the right bureaucrat finds out, your company is gone.
I'd speculate that the certification of hours might be an effort to deny unemployment benefits. The company can fire you for cause and claim that you lied about your hours. If everyone breaks some minor rule all of the time, then prosecution and punishment becomes entirely discretionary, used only when furthering the goals of the authority.
I'm not sure if this theory would actually prevail in an unemployment hearing - it varies significantly by state - but the business loses nothing by trying.
The business stands to lose something by trying this: when I learn that they knowingly entrap their own employees in this manner, I will refuse to work with them. I'm sure I'm not alone. Given the cluelessness of many companies' recruitment, they may very well not realize this, but they will in aggregate lose out on some portion of viable talent.
If a terminated employee can prove the sanctions are being applied arbitrarily that's totally grounds for wrongful termination.
But who knows, the court system is so in the pocket of employers in stuff like this and it's so expensive to litigate in the first place it never really happens unless you've got a huge organization with deep pockets.
I know this probably limits my career potential, but I consistently choose smaller companies and enjoy avoiding this kind of thing. There are software "mom and pop" companies all over the place, itching to find a good hire. I sign exactly one piece of paper, my employment contract, and they've always been good about negotiating good terms that allow me to keep my side projects and things of that nature. I think I would sooner change career than move into a corporate sized company, no matter how "startup" the culture is.
I've had mixed results going this approach early in my career. At small companies, you can find some _shockingly_ huge egos. "Tiny kings, in tiny kingdoms" as they say.
The worst one was where during the interview, the interviewer specifically warned about the dynamics of the place: "we serve at the pleasure."
And indeed we did. The owner expected bizarre rigid behaviors. For one, everybody clocked in/out (a question that didn't occur to me to even ask about), and if you clocked in >5 minutes after when you were supposed to start, you had to go to HR and sign a document explaining why. This was a development gig.
We also had to watch cartoons made by the owners wife. Absolutely bizarre place. I made it about 6mo before getting the hell outta there.
The other notable "small shop" experience was when I stopped getting paid on time and the company credit card started getting declined.
MegaCorp1 is nice in the way that the others were not.
Where I work this is a thing. We are required to report to the government how many hours we work and I think by law are entitled to overtime. Instead it gets reported as 40 his each week when that is obviously not true.
I'm ok with my compensation, and have no real complaints, except the lying to authorities pay.
This is in a FAANG company, but a European subsidiary.
An old defense contractor I worked at did the similar things.
It was required by federal contracting rules/law/whatever that our timesheet reporting be accurate. The spirit of the law was probably "don't charge us for time you didn't work for us", which is a reasonable requirement.
The problem was when I worked 70 or 80 hour weeks. I didn't get paid any more, the company didn't get paid any more (I have no idea how or why, I didn't do project or program management, so I have only the most cursory knowledge of the different flavors of the main contract types in defense contracting). I was just trying to follow the law and whatever agreements I had signed. Seems pretty easy, pretty cut and dry, right?
Nope. I was working on two projects - we often did this. 90% on one, 10% on the other, usually in some sort of super specialist role where you help with one specific aspect you might be good at and free up other devs' time to focus on the actual dev, not things like Decision Analysis and Reporting plans for your CMMI compliance. The problem was the percentages were fixed. That means if my 90% project was in crunch time, and I worked a 70 hour week, even if I still did the normal 5 hours for the 10% project, it didn't work out that way. They normalized all the hours back down to 40, so the normal 5 ended up looking more like 3. Shouldn't be a big deal, but different contract types, different budgets not burning at the right rates, blah blah blah blah blah.
The result was they asked me to work a proportionately increased amount on the 10% project, as well. So not only was I putting in an extra 30 hours a week for no extra pay, no benefits, no tangible rewards in any way, but they wanted me to do even more of that on the other 10% too.
Keep a record of your hours worked, and send them an invoice for the difference at the end of your employment there. Good chance they'll pay it to avoid the headache of arguing.
> In employee-employer relationships, the employer typically has all the power, so if you refuse to sign, you will likely be terminated.
Almost always, it won't hurt to ask. I've gotten approval to cross out some of the clauses when it didn't matter to the employer. Ex: ownership of work clause when I wasn't in a position providing work; but they wouldn't let me cross out asymmetric notice clauses.
I also neglected to sign an NDA for about two years once; I was asked to sign and scan prior to employment, but had some equipment issues and was told we'd do it on the first day, but it was forgotten, until investors wanted to see that everyone had an NDA prior to the next round of investment.
This can vary quite a bit employer to employer. As a contractor I've always successfully crossed out indemnification clauses, noncompete clauses (except while the contract is in progress), and anything that lays claim to my time or effort outside of work. But I've also been willing to walk.
You have more leverage as a contractor I think, the position is different to an employee. Clauses like noncompetes and IP claims outside of the contract are a pretty hard sell for a contractor, as it limits your ability to work after the job is done and as such it's going to be hard to hire a contractor with those kinds terms. I imagine clauses like that are designed to keep employees around for as long as possible, not really an aim if you're hiring a contractor.
Depends on the goals of the contractor. They might concede to some crazy agreements to be able to list a big name company or a high profile project on their work history to get higher paying work in the future.
Not saying this is right or proper... but if you are in the U.S. then this was almost certainly about corporate tax reporting. Your salary may or may not be deductible from the company's business tax, depending on whether your work is classified as an "operational" or "capital" expense.
Different companies are more or less zealous in how they collect documentation for these tax deductions. I've worked for companies where management just "handles it", and it's invisible to employees. I've worked for companies that not only make salaried employees log hours, but also do separate them by project code (with some codes being "operational" and other "capital").
I've rarely had any pushback over clarification or refusing to sign as-is. A lot of the time a strike-through on a portion of a contract is sufficient. My bigger issue is electronic signing against versions that don't have the option of striking a line or two.
My biggest concerns are outside contributions and IP. Personally, I don't believe in Software Patents for the most part, and will not give up rights for stuff I build on my own time.
I don't know if I'm just lucky, but I've always had good results just not presenting my compliance with the law as something I have a choice in. "Oh, gosh, I really want to sign this, but I need X to fulfill the legal requirements. Please help me resolve this so I can do the thing we both want."
Isn't the signature for the employer's CYA, not for your own? That is, if you lodged a complaint saying that you never received the pamphlet and were told to sign anyway (and especially if there's a paper trail of you saying you couldn't access the page and them telling you to sign anyway), can't they get in trouble for not following the law?
Yes-ish? That is, I'd be very surprised if anyone ever said "I know the page is down, but sign like it isn't anyway", at least in writing.
The general pattern for this sort of thing is that a different person from the one who got the complaint comes by and reminds you you haven't signed the form, and HR is breathing down their neck now. And if you explain about the error, they might reasonably say "well, if it's the same form as the one you did read, then who cares?" After all, it's not their form, they're not asking you to lie - just pointing out the same sensible thing you did in the first place. In the most extreme case, a bunch of people would ask this, none of them would ever push back up the chain, and if you refused strenuously enough you might get fired for "failing to sign the sexual harassment form" (or more likely, for no stated reason). Nobody's going to ask for a lie, they just ignore the problem and keep repeating the initial request. That doesn't necessarily make it legal, given that the complaint was raised, but it makes proving the misbehavior enormously difficult.
I don't remember who said this first, but the miracle of bureaucracy is that it can create causeless effects. A bunch of people make a bunch of reasonable, innocent-looking decisions, and somehow they all add up to "lie or get fired" without anyone ever having to say it.
Except it doesn't work that way. When your boss has you in the room to tell you your fired, instead he would just have the form you need read and to sign.
So you tell the boss that you need to see everything to sign it. Regardless of my relationship with my managers, they know that hiring a replacement is expensive and it's not worth being down a team member for a while, recruiting / interviewing, and training someone new over something silly.
(This might be legitimately less true for more entry-level jobs, which is why we have unions. Pushing back against unreasonable transfers of burden from the company to individually-low-power workers is basically the entire point of unions.)
> This might be legitimately less true for more entry-level jobs, which is why we have unions. Pushing back against unreasonable transfers of burden from the company to individually-low-power workers is basically the entire point of unions.
Precisely. If I had to guess which group of people get fired or penalized for this sort of thing most, I'd go with "shift managers". The shift manager at a fast-food franchise might have the most power in the room, but they don't have local control (i.e. ownership) or corporate power (i.e. any say in company policy). If somebody at the head office screws up like this, their options are to fire the person who won't sign, or complain upstream until they get fired.
If replacing people is a lot of work for the company (and especially if its not that hard on those replaced), these things tend to take care of themselves. If everyone is in one place and talking, sanity tends to prevail regardless. But when costs are low and power is sufficiently indirect, there's no guarantee anyone with a say in the matter will give it any thought.
Yes, exactly. The downside of those "causeless effects" I mentioned is that there's no guarantee they're good effects. After all, no individual consciously made the choice.
If the organization gets big enough, it's very possible that things simply become both mandatory and forbidden, and no one with the power to fix it cares enough to do so.
What if you just send an email to HR saying "Hey - my understanding from so-and-so is that it's known that the system is down and I should just sign the form anyway for now, so I did so. Please let me know when it's back up so I can read the brochure, thanks!"? Are they going to fire you for sending that email?
Not exactly, if you would blow the whistle with internal comms and there's evidence to suggest it's commonplace, the company can be fined without your just cause, as per pro-bono suit. Of course, there has to be some goodwill on prosecutor's side.
Not a job, but I signed up for a gym membership recently and the sales employee asked me to digitally sign the contract (displayed on screen) using an electronic signature pad.
Naturally I asked him to print out a copy so I could read it before signing. While I was reading the document, to make some small-talk I asked him how many people in the years he'd been there have actually read the contract they signed. His answer? 0. I was the first.
I backed my rental car into a tree and scratched the bumper on the vacation end of a business trip to Israel a couple of years ago. When I was at the rental agency working out how much I owed them, the lady handed me a paper to sign, completely in Hebrew, then got visibly annoyed when I insisted on looking at it through Google translate first.
This is another Pandora's box. I can't tell you how many times I've received emails regarding my relationship with the company as an employee that are also then labelled as being "confidential", and thus not to leave the company's systems. (I.e., I'm not technically allowed to make a paper trail.)
I've also received countless "confidential, do not forward. We just posted on our public blog <TL;DR of blog post>"
A job I worked at required that I acknowledge having received and read a pamphlet on sexual harassment in the workplace. My understanding is that it is a requirement of the state of CA that employers distribute such a pamphlet. The state even has a stock pamphlet that fulfills the requirement, though employers are free to substitute their own. My employer wanted me to acknowledge that I'd received the one via the HR website … except the link caused 500 Internal Server Errors.
I reported this, and even noted that if the link just goes to the standard pamphlet [and I linked to that] that we could consider the defect in the website "cured" and I could sign and life could move on. That part of the message got ignored, of course; the people responsible for the HR site are like "well it works for us?", and of course there's still pressure to sign a statement that I've read this thing.
All of that after I explicitly asked for any and all paperwork that would require my signature up front before becoming an employee. (This was, of course, not included in what I was given prior to starting.)