I quit a job in California. After my resignation, they sent me an email requesting that I confirm I turned over all employer property, and asked me to sign an agreement with the following:
Do I need to respond at all? Can I strike that if I don’t agree to that last statement? How should I handle this? We are a private university which is clearly engaged in unethical practices and I hope to submit a whistleblower complaint to the accreditation body.
No. They cannot require that you don’t say anything negative about them. Lumping all of these together seems illegal.
You seem to have nothing the gain from signing this. Similar to how you’d have nothing to gain by speaking to the police.
(I am not a lawyer)
Do not respond, do lawyer up. Sounds like they know they fucked up and they want to shut you up.
Sounds like the plan, I am not going to respond.
Keep us posted OP
This ^^^^
I am not a lawyer but i would ignore it. Unless they offer you a severance bonus or something and make it contingent on signing. If you’re not a fiduciary and nothing was in your original employment agreement, spill the beans once you’re free. Don’t lie or be emotional, keep it truthful and clean.
Not a lawyer but recently used a lawyer for something similar. They are hoping you’ll sign it.
Normally they tie it to a payment to get you to sign it.
No bonus. I was IT, and their system was designed to suppress wages and exploit workers. I was a tier 3 engineer everywhere before this, but the president demands everyone be brought in at a 1, then after “demonstrating competency” in 4 of these 6 areas he invented after 12 months you could move to a 2…After a year I was told my work wasn’t enough despite multiple objective major overhauls and improvements widely recognized by my peers and the organization’s faculty and staff. The president was going to buy tests for us to take, and never did. Then he fired our networking vendor (3 FTE’s) and expected me to pick up the work. In March, they posted a tier-3 network engineer position, and I applied for it and interviewed…and they cancelled the position, so I was left still doing the work for Tier 1 salary. The the president brought in a “consultant” who ended up being a family friend, who recommended we purchase expensive equipment through her consulting company which was completely unneeded and ultimately never worked and was left in a box. She insisted we needed new firewalls for our 2nd site (which had an MPLS back to us, where the traffic was all sent and ultimately went through our firewalls here). When she failed to deploy them, our director insisted that I figure out what she did, at which point he handed them to me, and they were not provisioned with our shared credentials. When asked for the credentials she refused to hand them over, which should have been the end of her employment. Instead, she was given decision making roles over additional higher-tier projects.
Then we had a mass resignation including our director, and I was 1 of 2 left (out of originally 6 with an additional 4 FTE’s of contractors). Even now, they wouldn’t promote me to 2…they told me they would find more tests for me to take, then I’d be welcome to apply for a tier 2 position once they post it in the future. I left.
The complication is my wife is faculty there, and we expect her to be retaliated against, but my documentation is ironclad, including of them intentionally not paying invoices from vendors while receiving services.
Take all this down and talk to a lawyer.
So they’re asking you to sign a contract without “consideration”, ie you get nothing. Hard no.
Coincidentally a contract without consideration is not legally enforceable.
Really? That’s useful information.
Get an attorney that specializes in whistleblowing cases before you sign anything.
Lemmy bringing the textbooks!
OP, para (b)(1)(B) gives some information that the employer might have forgotten to mention.
Pretty sure this is illegal now.
The time to form contracts is when both parties will benefit. If they’re offering something in return for this signature, you get to decide whether you want to take those benefits.
If not, just say you’re not interested in forming new agreements with them. Last time I was in a meeting with a manager trying to get a similar form signed, the phrase “this looks like a contract and you’re not offering anything in return” was useful, or “if this is merely a summary of what we’ve already agreed, then there is no need for a signature”.
Obviously any previous contracts you signed would still apply - so look in your original employment contract (and anything referenced therein) for your actual obligations.
That’s such a short contract I can’t help but think their legal department was nowhere near involved in writing it. It’s way too broad and may violate state labor laws, but I’m not a lawyer.
