If Bob signs a contract for Alice to paint a fence for $800 and a copy-paste error transfers her $1000 instead, yes.
But if the copy-paste error happened before the contract was signed? Leading to Bob promising Alice $1000 and signing a contract promising it? Then in all probability, Bob will end up paying the contract amount.
This has zero to do with the actual matter at hand, given that the people getting the raises 100% believed they were getting raises.
A contract is an agreement between parties. Parties are free to agree to changes to the contract.
* Both parties (AMZ & Employer) signed up to a bonus % in the contract
* There was a document that stated % was equivalent to $ which was miscalculated
* Employer agreed to pay whatever the % in the contract was, employee believed they were getting the $ in the estimate.
There are not takebacks here.
Actually, I know there legally could be, as these situations aren't always black and white, however the company, being such a position of power compared to the employee, loses all goodwill in this situation. If I were in this situation, I would already be sending out feelers.
Let the lawyers get together and do a retroactive class-action lawsuit to solve it. But Amazon will do whatever it wants until that suit comes through.
But yes: if these were contractors Amazon had hired it would be very different.
An at-will employee and their employer contract that for each hour of work (or each ~week salaried) performed by employee on instructions from employer, employer will pay to employee $X.
Just because such a contract doesn't contain any term indicating the length of time an employee will work doesn't make it less of a contract.
As further evidence, if at-will employment were not a contractual agreement there'd be no recourse for the employee to recover unpaid wages. And yet unpaid wages are recoverable.
Let me be more concrete: am employer presenting you with a plan for future compensation[1] in an existing employment relationship does not constitute a contract. They can pay you what they want to pay you.
[1] Your back wages argument doesn't apply here. These people never got paid at all.
Every raise I’ve ever received has been accompanied by a “contract” hr puts in my folder.
Work done for contract is a real thing, it's just not applicable here. When you hire a plumber or a caterer or a security consultancy, you write up a contract ahead of time describing exactly the work to be done and the bill to be paid, and then get the courts to enforce that when needed. That is simply not the way that salaried employment works in the USA. It's not.
Every job I’ve had has had a contract, and it’s usually “we pay what we want, we terminate you when we want, and you quit when you want.”
Now, sure, it's true that some elements of an employment agreement may constitute contracts and may have been enforced by courts. Back wages are a big one, obviously. Likewise promised benefits being denied, etc... But at-will compensation and termination just don't qualify. They don't. The Amazon workers can't sue for their mistake raises under contract law becuase those raises don't constitute contracts. Period.
I'm pretty sure if you do work, as contractually agreed, the contract requires you be paid for that work.
It's just a contract agreeing rates for work done, not a contract guaranteeing work will be done.
Yes it does (and I even said so in the comment you replied to), but compensation plans, raises, offer letters, etc... are not payment for work done, and are not contracts for work for the reason stated. These Amazon folks aren't getting a penny, and it absolutely stuns me that people want to argue otherwise.
That’s theirs.
But going forward, they don’t have any right to any level of pay above minimum wage.
I’ve personally dealt with this. I had an employer run out of money and be acquired by a new company. The new company owes paychecks for last pay period, but wants to pay everyone lower salaries.
Going forward the new company could pay whatever (above minimum wage). But they owned all the debts of the previous company including that last months wage.
We only had at will hiring agreements, but that didnt matter.
>note that at-will employment simply lacks several (the big one being "certainty"). In particular a "contract" that says "you can do whatever" is clearly not a contract under common law.
Which was in reply to a comment about every job having a contract.
Further your other examples could be contractually enforced.
If you accepted an employment contract based on the compensation plan, that forms part of the contract. Raises are updates to the contract, unless you're saying it's potentially ok to claw back 40 years of pay raises when some one retires. Offer letters are probably more questionable but if there's a specific start date and pay has already been discussed, it seems to me that that would form a contract.
The key thing in this particular situation seems to be that there was an error, and the error was rectified quickly.
Banks offer accounts with “whatever we feel like” interest rates. Bonds can have “whatever we feel like” interest rates. Stocks can have “whatever we feel like” dividends. Short term rentals have “whatever we feel like” rental prices.
In practice, the payer offers a very short term guarantee: “for the next pay period, you will get $50 an hour”, but after that pay period they change it.
There are contracts behind all these things.
One party offers something on a continuous basis: labor, money, etc. The other party walks away when they don’t like what they’re getting.