or, how binding can a contract be?
say a multi-billionaire who’s no longer content to just fire people. he now wants to recruit some ‘employees’ from a third-world country and hire them for his plantation in america. assuming willing contractees to any kind of stipulations on the contract, how far can a contract go and still be upheld in courts? how about american employees?
/whip
In short, criminal courts can’t force you to physically fulfill a contract. Civil courts do have some equitable remedies at their disposal (e.g., injunctions), but in general they can’t force you to act.
The real limitation here is that you can’t use or threaten to use force on your workers or their families.
If you take that away and add wages into the equation, you’re not a slaveholder.
Right. The courts generally can’t force you to provide the service you agreed to in your contract, usually all they can do is enforce the penalty phase of the contract. So if you sign a contract to work for Mr Moneybags digging ditches for 99 years in return for room and board, and then you change your mind, the sherrif can’t round you up and send you back to the ditchdigging crew at the point of a gun.
Mr. Moneybag’s only recourse is to sue you for non-fulfillment of the contract, and he could win a judgement against you for the value of that labor that you failed to provide. So the absolute most he could get is a judgement for the value of 99 years of ditchdigging, plus penalties as specified in the contract.
Or to put it into real-world terms, suppose I call up a plumber, and he signs a contract with me to come to my house and fix my leaky toilet in return for $300. I pay the $300, but he never shows. Even if I sue the plumber, the sherrif won’t arrest him, escort him to my property, and force him to fix the toilet at gunpoint. At most I can hire another plumber to fix the toilet, and the first plumber has to pay the bill, plus damages that the leaky toilet caused while I was waiting for the plumber that never showed.
Illegal contracts are unenforcable. If I agree sign an agreement to be your slave for payment of $1,000, then take the money and refuse to perform the services, you cannot take me to court to honor the contract.
Yes, illegal contracts are unenforceable. If you agree to pay me $1000 to murder your wife, you give me the money but I don’t murder your wife, you’re out of luck.
But it would depend on the definition of “slave” used in the contract. Just because you signed a contract allowing your employer to whip you doesn’t mean he can’t be charged criminally for assault if he whips you. And if you agree to work for your employer for the rest of your life without pay, it seems that the damages to your employer if you refuse to work for him would be zero, that being the amount you and he agreed your work was worth.
is there a limit on the penalty on the contract? can it be set unreasonably high so it’s ‘dig the ditch or be a bankrupt’? what if you sign an agreement to wear a chain collar 24/7 and tied to/follow wherever Mr Moneybag wants. would the court laugh the contract away or do they have to honour it?
Another facet of a contract is that it must include consideration for both parties: That is to say, both parties must gain something of value. Typically, the consideration is a product or service for one party, and money for the other party. But a contract that just said “I, John Smith, agree to work for the rest of my life on Bob Doe’s farm picking cotton” doesn’t include any consideration for Smith, so it’s not a contract at all.
Now suppose that in a Third World country, Hellholistan, slavery is legalized again. If an American business opens a factory there that is staffed by slave labor, and they send American managers to manage the plant in the country where slavery is legal, are the American owners in violation of the 14th Amendment? (For that matter, if an American company owned fruit plantations manned by slaves in an island nation where it was legal to own slaves and the American executives maintained a residence there and the system was pretty much identical to 1800 Virginia, would the American who lived there [who is stilla US citizen] be violating any laws and subject to arrest upon return to the U.S.?)
For starters you’d have to pay minimum wage: http://www.dol.gov/esa/regs/compliance/whd/whdfs12.htm
Which is why this is incorrect:
But, as the linked information indicates, you wouldn’t have to pay overtime.
What other working conditions were you considering?
A lot of things might depend on state law, too.
There could be consideration. For example, if you were in debt, and a person promised to pay off that debt in exchange for your becoming his slave, that would be consideration – and that kind of contract is not unknown where slavery is legal.
But there are two parts of slavery being illegal most places. The first is that contracts for service are unenforceable, as already mentioned. The second is that contracts for the sale of human beings as property are completely unenforceable and illegal as well, so if A gives to B $1,000 in exchange for ownership of C, not only will the courts not enforced the servitude of C, but they probably won’t require B to return the $1,000 for lack of consideration, because the contract was illegal.
There are people in the BDSM community who sign contracts when beginning a Master/slave relationship. The slave is essentially entering into “voluntary servitude,” and all the conditions and limits of that servitude are spelled out in the contract, and also signed before witnesses.
I’ve never heard of such a thing winding up in court, though, testing its legality.
Indeed, that’s called “peonage”, and it has been illegal in the United States since 1867. Court cases involving that prohibition have been a source for tests of the limits of “servitude”, and provide some of the answers to the OP.
As the above text implies, the proximate motivation for the Anti-Peonage Act was labor practice in New Mexico, where peonage persisted as a holdover from Mexican times. In the ensuing decades, however, the law had greater application in the South, where share-cropping and convict leasing often edged uncomfortably close to “holding a person to service until a debt is paid”. The Anti-Peonage Act was grounded in the Thirteenth Amendment, not in the commerce clause, and thus applies to intrastate as well as interstate “commerce”.
As one example of litigation under this law, see Clyatt v. U.S.:
In addition to forced labor, modern US civil rights provisions make null and void any signing away of a person’s civil rights. For example, an employer cannot mandate that you vote Republican as a condition of employment, etc. Other things have been explicitly banned by law, such as the outlawing of “Yellow Dog” employment contracts, once used to prohibit an employee from joining a union, but now illegal since 1932.
But the consideration has to be a legal consideration for a contract to be formed. Since slavery is illegal, the promise to become a slave in exchange for the debt being forgiven is an illegal consideration, and therefore no contract has been formed.
That depends on the law of the jurisdiction. Traditionally, the common law (at least in England and Canada) is very hostile to penalty clauses. In this case, I would think the court would refuse to enforce a penalty clause, for the very reason that it is an attempt to enforce servitude.
Over here, a penalty clause is what the court calls a clause it decides not to enforce; courts enforce liquidated damages clauses, but not penalty clauses. See, e.g., http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=mo&vol=/appeals/071997/&invol=12407_97 ; http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=ok&vol=/supreme/1935/&invol=29696
There is an alternative to slavery which is still slavery for all practical intents and purposes, and it has a long and honorable history in this country: The company town. All of the employees of a company live and work in a town owned by the company. All of the housing, schools, shops, and land is company-owned, and the employees (due to simple practical reasons, not contract provisions) do all their shopping at those company stores and (again, due to simple practical reasons) never get to buy their homes from the company.
The stores work like this: The pay is kept low enough nobody can live on it, but the store is happy to extend credit. As long as you are in debt to the store, it is obviously illegal to evade your responsibilities by quitting and leaving town. However, as long as you work at company pay you are never going to pay off your debt to the store. Especially if you have family to feed. Is there any way to get out of this? Sixteen tons a day is a mighty hard load.
How does this work in the opposite case: ‘closed-shop’ workplaces, which requires workers to join and be in good standing with a union as a stipulation of their employment contract?
I’m not sure, except that that is considered controversial enough that many states have “right to work” laws explicitly banning closed shops.