You can't sign a contract that allows someone to murder you -- there's case law supporting that.
But you can sign a contract that limits your future ability to speak freely.
Regardless of what case law says about this, a lot of people appear to feel that this really shouldn't be a thing, particularly when there's a large power imbalance between the parties, and when the more powerful party is obviously trying to hide evidence of malfeasance, embarrassing secrets, etc.
What is the moral thing to do if you're the less powerful party and you feel that your counterpart is acting immorally in offering you a contract like this?
Maybe the moral position is not to take the money.
Maybe it's okay to take the money and leak it anyway (assuming you think you can get away with it), because your counterpart is already irredeemably unethical, and all you can do is try to make the best of a bad situation.
I don't think it's always so clear cut. Contracts shouldn't always be considered sacred.
There's often social pressure to shut up, sign whatever they put in front of you, and take the severance money. It can be extremely difficult to go against this pressure, especially if you're not particularly well paid or powerful and the company is throwing resources at trying to fire you.
I'm not suggesting that she should or shouldn't have done what she did here, I'm just trying to push back against all the commenters blindly stating that "she violated her contract! what did she expect would happen?"
It's true, that's what happened, and that's what one should expect. But there's more nuance to how this interaction works, and I think it's a little disingenuous to leave it at just that, especially if you're going to bring morality into the picture.
For me it wasn't social pressure. Its 'at will' laws, employer can fire you for no reason whatsoever( unless its discrimination sort of deal), so ppl get what they can in form of severance.
I’m responding to your assertion that this is a simple open and shut case legally and she has zero recourse. You don’t know the facts and I suspect you’re not attorney. You have no idea whether that’s true or not.
Depending on her other financial situations she might be facing financial disaster including uninsured, life destroying, medical bills plus the inability to get any other position while visibly pregnant.
It's highly likely that she was pretty much obliged to take the money regardless of how she felt.
> You talk to a lawyer in that situation
Stop and listen to yourself.
Do you honestly not see how someone in this situation might not believe that retaining a lawyer is a realistic possibility for them?
Morally? At this point she's standing on higher ground than you.
I think this idea that she is pregnant this somehow not responsible has some terrible implications.
The top-level comment tried to describe the moral high ground as directly dependent on strict adherence to the letter of the contract. This is the key issue that I object to in this thread.
An action being legal does not necessarily imply that the action is also moral, and vice versa. Context matters. Intent matters.
Is it moral for a company to ask an outgoing employee to sign a non-disparagement agreement in exchange for severance? Maybe. Did the company misbehave when trying to fire that employee? Is the lawyer or HR person offering the contract aware of what happened? Is somebody that's part of this chain of events knowingly trying to use this exchange to sweep a scandal under the rug? Is the company trying to use the personal or financial circumstances of the employee as leverage to get her to agree to something she normally would not agree to (i.e. "pseudo-duress")?
If any of these things are true, I don't think it's moral for the company to ask for this exchange. Her decision to accept or reject the terms of the contract does not change this, especially if the company tried to use their position of power to influence her decision.
Now, is she acting morally in trying to break the terms of the contract? I don't think it depends on whether or not she's pregnant, but I do think it depends on whether or not the company acted morally in offering her the contract in the first place.
The moral math here is super simple. It's just karma. "If you act immorally towards other people, they might feel morally justified in trying to screw you over. Maybe they're right... maybe you had it coming."
Lots of people subscribe to this idea.
i was fired before with one day notice. It came as total shock to me since i had very good preformance reviews before that. I researched this a lot and found out that employer can fire you for no reason whatsover. They don't have to establish anything.
>trying to get rid of her without doing the proper legwork to establish that she failed in any measuable fashion.
I responded to this quoted comment sayin that employer has to establish poor performance. I was fired with any sort of "establish" and i found out that i couldn't do anything.
https://employment.findlaw.com/losing-a-job/at-will-employme...
Realistically being fired for being a pregnant female is a thing and being fired for being a white dude from Oregon isn't.
There is a grab bag of exceptions that vary by state. Please see
https://employment.findlaw.com/losing-a-job/at-will-employme...
I'll excerpt a relevant part
>Covenant of Good Faith Exception
>Recognized in a small minority of states, including California, this exception reads a covenant of good faith and fair dealing into every employment relationship. This exception means either that employer personnel decisions are subject to a "just cause" standard or that terminations in bad faith or motivated by malice are prohibited.
Lambda is based in CA.
Even hr at penny ante jobs establishes a narrative and documentation for reasons to terminate for good reason.
It's an HR nightmare to fire a pregnant woman, most would rather just avoid that particular claim and pay a few more months of salary
Re-negotiation happens between the two parties, one person can't simply choose to break the agreement becasue they feel it is fine.
> Now it turns out that every last bad rumour you head about Lambda School is in fact true
Source?
The purpose of an NDA is typically to penalize someone if they speak the truth.
This would have been the correct route
> Maybe it's okay to take the money and leak it anyway (assuming you think you can get away with it), because your counterpart is already irredeemably unethical, and all you can do is try to make the best of a bad situation.
No this sets you up for even more financial harm and makes you untrustworthy ... if you can't follow a simple agreement that you are freely signing how can I trust anything that comes out of your mouth.
> I don't think it's always so clear cut. Contracts shouldn't always be considered sacred.
If the contract is legal it should be - if your unsure if it's legal talk to a lawyer. Without contracts being actually enforceable if one party believes it's immoral then everything goes to shit.
The law does not dictate this. Repercussions that stem from breaking the law also have no bearing on whether or not an action can be morally justified.
You are talking about whether a position can be legally justified. The two are not the same thing.
You and I have a disagreement privately lets say over a potted plant. In the end we decide to part ways and I say here you can have the potted plant lets just never have this come out again I never want to hear about this argument again. You shake my hand and agree that's fair, take your potted plant head home and immediately call all of our mutual friends and begin to say all kinds of horrible things about me.
Who was the immoral one there? I'd argue the one who broke the final agreement
The entire point of a settlement / severance / etc is the two parties saying you know what we are done of this fight - here is what makes you feel happy to walk away from it ($$) and here is what makes us feel happy (to not have to hear about it anymore).
You're using a generic "disagreement" and "potted plant" rather than "employer tried to improperly fire an employee" and "$36,000 severance for a non-disparagement agreement." I think you're doing this deliberately in order to make the letter of the agreement seem more important than the details of what happened.
My moral calculus is explained clearly here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22533048
If your question is serious, then no, I don't think the immoral one is necessarily the one who broke the final agreement. In certain cases, the one who acted poorly first might be the immoral one. Signing and then breaking an agreement could, in some cases, be a response that is morally justifiable, even if it is illegal, and even if there are legal reprecussions. If the retaliating party takes it too far, then they might be the immoral one.
I'm making no claims about what was or wasn't morally justifiable in this particular story. But I'm shocked that so many people seem to think that a contract is sacred and that a person who breaks one is automatically the immoral party.
The actual circumstances of the situation matter more than whether or not a written agreement is broken. There are times when deciding to break a contract after signing it is morally justifiable. There are even times when signing a contract with the intention of breaking it later might be morally justifiable.
Is it really that difficult for people to come up with a contrived example here? Coercion? Duress? Extreme power imbalances between the signing parties? Implied threats? Lying to get out of a dangerous situation? Do people not even see these things as possibilities? It seems blindingly obvious to me that the circumstances matter.
While non disclosure has a valid use case to protect valuable business info from competitors its hard to argue with a straight face that it ought to be used to hide wrongdoing. Such an agreement is unconscionable and therefore invalid.
If they predicated her severance on compliance with an immoral and invalid clause that would appear to be their problem. The invalid nature of the clause doesn't require her to give the money back.
Its not illegal, every severance comes with that clause. Show me a single case where this was deemed illegal.
If you want to insist on that definition of morality that I would just invent a new word that has a more important meaning.