That’s not at all clear. The rate change may have occurred five months in and that’s why they were withholding for four months or it may be that they were told that they’d be paid at a lesser rate for the first four months of their next nine months.
Since it’s stated that it has been seven months since then, I assume the first interpretation is not possible as that would be 12 months since the contract started and well past its nine month term.
Perhaps there is a third interpretation.
Yeah, this part
Maybe. Because it’s either not actually an enforceable contract *, you don’t remember the details, or you don’t want to provide the details.
Though I maintain the original post, when read very strictly,* yields the right result, I do also see several problems in it that make it hard to read it strictly. So I’ve amended everything, as per posts 14 and 19.
*The clincher is her statement “You guys have to give me that money back now, because the contract doesn’t state that you may pay me any less than the amount it states you will pay me” She’s not complaining that her new contract is smaller than her old ones, she’s complaining that the company’s not paying her what her present written contract actually says they’ll pay her. If you forget about all mention of contract renewals and put it out of your mind, the implication of this becomes clear. But of course my OP, by mentioning renewals, made it hard to “forget all mention of renewals.”
Well, good catch I guess. The actual wording was something like “Failing to perform duties in a manner satisfactory to XCorp is grouds for immediate termination of this contract.”
And yeah, there really was a provision stating she couldn’t terminate without the president’s approval. I wondered about the enforceability of that particular provision, but didn’t figure this rendered the whole thing null.
Anyway, I mean, I really don’t think the central question is unanswerable, is it? Can you be said to have implicitly renegotiated a contract by continuing to uphold your end of it when the other party has ceased upholding their end of it? I wouldn’t have thought so!
If it was an actual contract that said she got paid a certain sum upon completion of the nine months , then no , it couldn’t be said that she renegotiated it. It’s also probably illegal to pay an employee that way since most states require at least a monthly paycheck and it may make a difference if she was paid monthly or weekly as sage would be required to mitigate her damages- and in this case, mitigating would be not working for the reduced pay. She still wouldn’t have renegotiated the contract though.
If it's not an actual contract (and it's seeming more and more like that's the case) then they effectively terminated her from one job when they cut her pay and offered her a lower paying one which she accepted by continuing to work.
The reason I'm saying it looks less and less like a contract is that line about "failure to perform in a manner satisfactory to X corp is grounds for immediate termination of this contract". Seems to my non-lawyer mind that that line means she is an at-will employee , even though they call it a contract.
Here is my layman’s understanding of contracts:
You cannot, however, have both. If you have a written contract, you cannot verbally modify it. And the OP is a perfect example of why you cannot do this; it leads to ambiguity and uncertainty. And if you don’t have a meeting of the minds, you don’t have a contract.
I’m imagining how this would go if they don’t pay her, and she sues for the additional money she feels she’s owed.
In front of the judge, the two parties agree there’s a written contract. The company says they told her she was getting reduced pay three months into the contract. She says she never agreed to that change, and kept working per her existing contract. The company says… what, exactly?
They have no evidence she agreed to this modification. They didn’t terminate the contract, so they can’t complain that she continued working, because that’s what she was required to do per her existing contract.
That’s the sticking point right there. The company is not going to concede that. They’re going to say it was simply a letter setting out their expectations and her pay/ benefits while stating that the employment was at-will. It’s was just an unfortunate mistake that the letter was titled employment contract , and even if Joanne truly believed it was a contract that made her employment something other than at-will, Corporation X did not, and as there was no meeting of the minds, there was no contract.Lets assume the judge finds that it is a contract.
The company says that she had an obligation to mitigate her damages and she therefore should have said/done something at the time she was notified of a paycut.
She wasn’t necessarily required to continue working if they breached a contract. Let’s say I lease you an apartment for a year. After two months, you give me notice that you will be vacating the apartment after month three. I am not entitled as a landlord to abide by the contract that does not allow me to rent to anyone else, leave the apartment empty, and then sue you for the nine months rent. I am required to try to rent it. If it takes me two months to rent it, I can sue you for that two months of rent. If I am able to rent it so quickly I don’t lose any rent,I won’t be able to sue you for any rent. So it’s not impossible that the company could win on the basis that she was notified in advance that her pay would be cut and she would have had no damages if she had not continued to work after the effective date of the paycut.
Thanks for the comments everyone.
For the record, the change was instituted immediately. So she would have had no way to mitigate the damages completely–but I suppose some kind of calculation could be done based on the average amount of time it takes a person of her education and work experience to find work, or something like that, to determine what the damages actually were.
Someone else has pointed me to the concept of “anticipatory repudiation” which does indeed create (for the other party, i.e., the one not doing the repudiating) a responsibility to mitigate damages. This may be what Doreen is referring to.
It’s sounding to me like maybe she’s owed some but not all of the money they unilaterally decided not to pay her. The “implicit renegotiation” argument seems wrong, but it may have been her attempt to relay to me their (not lawyers) attempts to relay to her what they had heard from lawyers about anticipatory repudiation.