That's like saying, "it's dishonorable to agree to a contract to kill someone knowing full well such a contract isn't enforceable."
If one party holds all the cards in a contract negotiation it's never truly being negotiated in good faith in the first place. Furthermore, one could argue that without having an expert on contract law right then and there available to answer any questions about any given contract means it falls under a "lack of capacity" for basically anyone who isn't a lawyer.
Employee agreements often fail in courts because of:
- Duress
- Lack of capacity (e.g. due to overly complicated legalese *specifically written to be hard to understand*)
- Undue influence (e.g. company says they'll hire someone else if you ask to get the contract reviewed by a lawyer before signing)
- Misrepresentation (e.g. job was described as "X" but turns out it's "Y")
- Non-disclosure (e.g. candidate was not told job would require purchasing products or services sold by the company itself or a partner)
- Unconscionability (e.g. some term or terms in the contract are so unfair that it cannot be allowed to stand... Like a non-compete that says you can't work within 50 miles of your former place of employment if you leave)
The "usual one" is unconscionability: Employers have unfair bargaining power almost all of the time and judges and juries are easy to convince of this. Also, these sorts of things don't usually make it to court unless there's something ridiculous in the contract. What's interesting is there usually is something ridiculous in every employee contract. It's just that those ridiculous things aren't usually the part of the contract a company is trying to enforce so they don't come up as often.
It's even more dishonorable for a company with a legal team to offer up terms in a contract that are explicitly illegal, and then use those illegal terms to conduct unfair and deceptive business practices in the labor market.
In fact, that scenario is so dishonorable that in some states you can ask the court for triple damages if the employer tries to enforce the noncompete
For anyone in the US who needs regular healthcare beyond what's provided by Medicaid, the labor market is a war for (literal) survival. If the ownership class didn't want to return to an extremely adversarial relationship with labor, then they shouldn't have gutted the social safety net.
And no, I'm not going to show my hand in an imperfect information game... it would be stupid and dishonorable to my family to present with anything other than bourgeoisie professional-managerial class sensibilities.
Dishonorable? I don't think so. They're the ones trying to trick employees into immoral and illegal obligations. They only have themselves to blame if it blows up in their faces. They played the game and they lost.
If an agreement is unenforceable, it's almost certainly abusive and exploitative in nature. I mean, it actually got to the point that the agreement was overridden by law. Doesn't even make sense to talk about honor in the same context. Would honorable people propose such an agreement?
They're likely banking on that sense of honor to make you hold yourself to obligations they can't legally hold you to.
After all, we make promises all the time that are unenforceable, but we keep them.