Your Employment Contract Is Becoming Our Problem
Whether it’s CEOs or fast-food servers, the evolution of employment from an open-ended relationship based on goodwill to a transactional one based on increasingly complex contracts bodes ill for companies and workers.
Would you like a non-compete clause with that?
Photographer: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images North AmericaToday’s revolutions in the nature of work seemingly have no end: the rise of working from home and hybrid work; the spread of electronic surveillance; the arrival of the gig economy; the improvement in the quality of coffee; even office yoga. In his new book, Our Least Important Asset, Peter Cappelli, a professor at Wharton Business School and America’s reigning guru on the nature of work, adds another one to the list: the growing use of legal contracts to manage employees.
The classic employment relationship is an open-ended one: The employer pays you for your time, and you do what you can, within reason, to advance the organization’s interests. In the Anglo-Saxon world, two suitably open-ended Common Law principles govern this relationship: the “duty of care” obliges both workers and employers to look after each other’s interests; and the “duty of loyalty” prevents workers from being critical of their employees in a way that might hurt the business.