Love Contracts: Your Opinions
In honor of Valentine’s Day, we conducted a poll to get your thoughts on the hot topic of love contracts.
What’s a Love Contract? To protect itself from liability, an employer requires romantically intertwined employees to sign an agreement stating that (1) the relationship is 100% welcome, voluntary and consensual and (2) they will fully comply with the employer’s anti-discrimination and anti-harassment policies, including immediately reporting any and all harassment, avoiding nepotism/favoritism and working in a professional manner at all times.
The Vote. Illustrating the divided opinions on this topic, the vote was a perfect 50-50 split, with half of you saying that love contracts are a good idea and half saying they ain’t.
Your Comments. Several prominent attorneys weighed in on the subject . . .
Eric Welter called love contracts “a sign of a confused and overlawyered society.”
Jon Hyman said: “If the company is not going to prohibit intra-office romances per se, than anything that would be covered by a “Love Contract” should be already covered by a company’s anti-harassment policy. It seems like overkill to have employees sign off on such a document when they are already bound by the harassment policy.”
Joel Spitz added: “While there may be some upside to love contracts, there’s also a distinct downside because, assuming that the company has in place an appropriate anti-harassment policy, all employees should already be bound by that policy. If the company doesn’t consistently have all employees who are romantically involved sign a love contract it could undercut the effectiveness of the anti-harassment policy.”
The rather interestingly named HR Wench voiced her agreement with the above.
My Thoughts. Echoing those comments, it seems to me that love contracts basically force the HR Department to act as the love police. Effective and consistently enforced anti-harassment policies should already address most of the concerns.
One can easily imagine the following conversation taking place in a company that adopts a love contract policy:
HR: Hello, Greg.
Greg: Hello.
HR: I heard you’re dating Marcia. Is that true?
Greg: No, actually I’m dating Alice.
HR: Oh, really? I thought Sam was dating Alice.
Greg: No, he’s dating Carol now.
HR: Hmm. I thought Carol and Mike were married.
Greg: Did you hear that Bobby’s dating Cindy? And that Jan’s dating Peter?
HR: I quit. (Hands him a stack of love contracts). Congratulations — you’re our new Head of HR. Get everyone to sign one of these.
February 20th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
[...] Toth at the Manpower Employment Blawg has a follow-up post today here on his Valentine’s Day survey regarding love contracts. Apparently the results were evenly [...]