> Currently contracts seem to be nothing more than one-sided weapons that powerful companies use to get vulnerable people to do things that they otherwise wouldn’t and can’t afford to fight. Let’s not pretend that more than a small fraction of employees out there actually get to meaningfully alter the contracts under which they work.
A straightforward way to address this could be through standardized contracts/clauses for mass markets. In the world of software understanding is not free, and the world of ambiguous natural language legalese is clearly even worse! In a market big enough to have many parallel participants, each clause of an agreement should be selected from a standardized bag such that online reading can readily explain your rights and responsibilities.
For the most part, this is already somewhat done through state "employment law", "landlord-tenant law", and the like. But then we get the OP situation, as well as contracts that actually attempt to countermand the law - I recently had the pleasure of reading a lease that was essentially an anti-tenant screed.
From the other direction, it also would be nice to voluntarily be able to give up a currently "standardized right" - say I don't need hot water in my apartment for savings of $100/mo. Assuming it was truly consensual and not just setting up a race to the bottom - percentages quotas or the like could address this.
A straightforward way to address this could be through standardized contracts/clauses for mass markets. In the world of software understanding is not free, and the world of ambiguous natural language legalese is clearly even worse! In a market big enough to have many parallel participants, each clause of an agreement should be selected from a standardized bag such that online reading can readily explain your rights and responsibilities.
For the most part, this is already somewhat done through state "employment law", "landlord-tenant law", and the like. But then we get the OP situation, as well as contracts that actually attempt to countermand the law - I recently had the pleasure of reading a lease that was essentially an anti-tenant screed.
From the other direction, it also would be nice to voluntarily be able to give up a currently "standardized right" - say I don't need hot water in my apartment for savings of $100/mo. Assuming it was truly consensual and not just setting up a race to the bottom - percentages quotas or the like could address this.