A Contractarian Theory of Workplace Justice

Introduction

Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights asserts that “everyone has the right to . . . just and favourable conditions of work.” A just and equitable workplace is not only a human right that needs to be respected, however; it is a determinant of firm efficiency and therefore ought to be an organizational priority. Recent research has shown that workers care about pay justice (Valet 2023) and that perception of organizational justice has a negative relationship with emotional exhaustion and a positive relationship with well-being (Karaca et al. 2023); it mitigates the negative impact of abusive supervision on employee creativity (Akram et al. 2022); and it has a significant direct negative effect on deviant workplace behaviors, more so than ethical leadership even (Tufan et al. 2023). The adverse consequences of injustice include poor team climate, reduced productivity and well-being, and work-related illnesses (Virtanen and Elovainio 2018) among other counterproductive staff behaviors (Lambert et al. 2024).

How can places of work attain this just ideal? In this study, I define justice in contractarian terms: A just workplace is one in which workers’ human rights are respected and they are not coerced to do anything outside of their contract of employment. I also theorize about a contractarian method for achieving this kind of justice by strengthening contracts of employment and enforcing a workplace culture that prevents workers from non-contractual coercion.

On this interpretation, workplace justice is easily attainable. While it’s often achieved in many workplaces, many remain extremely unjust. Why is this? I examine externalities to my contractarian approach to workplace justice, not to solve them, but to demonstrate that the principal threats to a contractarian approach are external to the workplace, such as inefficient legal systems or inelastic market conditions that take power away from employees and give employers a pre-contractual power of coercion that prevents workers from entering into fair contracts in the first place.

Workplace Justice

I will not in this study identify any principles of economic justice or economic equity (see Thomson 2008). I am not concerned with relational egalitarianism or anything like that. I am here only concerned with the relationship between an individual employer and an individual employee. The most basic ethical principle of this relationship I judge as completely uncontroversial:

(1) The human rights of all workers must always be respected.

Here are some human rights relevant to the workplace:^[1]

(a) No one shall be required to perform forced labor.

(b) No one’s privacy, family, or home shall be arbitrarily interfered with.

(c) Everyone has the right to freedom of expression.

(d) No one shall have their rights infringed by discrimination.

(e) No one shall be subjected to degrading treatment or punishment.

(f) Everyone has the right to rest and leisure.

(g) Everyone has the right to equal pay for equal work.

(h) All workers have the right to just and favorable remuneration.

(i) Everyone has the right to form and join a trade union.

I judge the respect of workers’ human rights as necessary but insufficient for workplace justice. To this principle I do not anticipate any opposition.

There are many loftier ideals such that, if they obtain, we might be sufficiently justified in considering a workplace properly just. These might be deontological, consequentialist, virtue-ethical, and so on. What I think might be most relevant, however, and will cut across all these different avenues, is a political-ethical contractarian principle:

(2) Nobody has the right to coerce another beyond the power afforded to them in a contract of employment signed in good faith and in full understanding and that might be terminated without prejudice.

There is much debate about the legitimacy of contractarianism when it comes to social norms and the power of the state, not least because the idea of a social contract must be implicit or metaphorical (Cudd and Eftekhari 2021, §2), none of us having signed up to the rules of the world when we were born into it. The chief problems are that, insofar as the agreement is hypothetical, it cannot be said to represent agreement at all (Dworkin 1975), and even if there were a literal historical contract, the consent of one’s ancestors does not bind oneself (Hume 1764). When it comes to the workplace, however, I deem this principle to be much less objectionable: After all, when it comes to employment, all workers have signed a contract.

That there is always a contract in place is what makes contractarianism particularly useful with respect to workplace justice. I do not need to worry about the difficulty of my principle of justice being incommensurable with some other moral attitude (consider, for example, the long-lasting tension between deontology and consequentialism). In the case of contractarianism, it is left up to the moral agents to determine a contract commensurable with each other’s moral approach and, thus, if there is a contract in place, it should follow that adherence to the contract does not clash with either party’s individual moral perspective, and that coercion beyond the contract is a moral abuse in both parties’ terms. Such a circumstance will not obtain such that it is only in one party’s moral view that an injustice has taken place.

This is a brand-new interpretation of workplace justice that diverges from existing virtue-ethical, consequentialist, or deontological accounts. Its main novelty is that anything can, in principle, go into an employment contract, and thus there’s nothing that is essentially unethical about a workplace. It all depends on what any individual worker is willing to do for the compensation they’re receiving. Therefore, unlike other theories, this contractarian theory of workplace justice is particularist.

Contractarianism

How does the mere adherence to an employment contract ensure workplace justice as I have defined it, namely, respect for human rights and the absence of coercion? My argument is as follows:

(1) A contract is signed stating signatories’ rights and obligations.

(2) Adherence to it means both parties only ever do what they agreed.

(3) Doing what you agreed in good faith cannot constitute coercion.

(4) Therefore, the workplace is just: There is neither coercion nor rights abuse.

An example of one of the rights and obligations that might be stated within the employment contract is working hours. If working hours are properly respected, it prevents such injustices as death from overwork (karōshi 過労死), the requirement of salarymen in Japan to remain at work until their managers leave, or to socialize after hours, all of which represent abuses of the right to rest and leisure and the right to freedom from forced or compulsory labor.

Likewise, the employment contract ought to specify the rights of the employer too. There have been numerous cases in the United States where workers were coerced beyond what they consented to in good faith, such as for smoking off duty (Pfeiffer 2006), complaining about a state representative (Porter 2017), having premarital sex (Marcotte 2013), being too attractive (Nelson v. Knight 2013),^[2] failing to show up at a political rally (Banerjee 2012), and because their daughter was raped by a friend of the employer (Arnett 2013). All these cases reasonably constitute interference with these workers’ privacy, family, or home and are, therefore, abuses of human rights.

What we have here are two ways in which contracts have failed workers thus far. In the first case, it is because the terms of the contract have not been seriously respected. In the second, contracts have failed to specify the powers of employers who have, in turn, taken a loose approach to human rights—specifically the right to privacy. These failures are why I am here arguing for more serious drafting of and adherence to an employment contract as a method to achieve workplace justice.

Discussion

There are several fundamental challenges to workplace justice that I am obliged to mention for the sake of diligence. To name some of the most notable: Environmentalism, feminism, and postcolonialism all challenge the basic assumption that a facet of society such as the workplace can be just when, firstly, the society in which it is entrenched has a colonial and patriarchal history and, secondly, the resources utilized come from the natural world—specifically underdeveloped countries that were once colonies and may still be economically colonized. Marxism also poses a problem for the very notion of the modern workplace in which workers are alienated (entfremdung) from their essence (gattungswesen) due to the division of labor (see Marx 1959). Yet another concern might be the social ramifications of work, such as the stigmatization of the salaryman (sararīman サラリーマン) in Japan as “corporate livestock” (shachiku 社畜), a “company dog” (kaisha no inu 会社の犬), and a “corporate soldier” (kigyou senshi 企業戦士).

In this study, I am going to ignore these deeper and wider challenges, not only for the sake of brevity but because my purpose here is more immediate. What I aim to do here is to identify a method whereby an individual might work for a company without either of them—as individual, not social, entities—suffering injustices in the workplace itself. In order for justice to obtain, human rights must be respected and individuals must not be coerced beyond what they have agreed in good faith in their contracts. The method toward this is a basic respect for the terms of the employment contract.

These injustices can only be avoided if the employment contract is followed religiously. There are, however, a few reasons why this might not be the case. For one, it might be insufficiently detailed. Stating that the employee will work forty hours a week, for example, does not preclude the employer from calling them in the dead of night to have them convert a jpeg to pdf, and does not therefore protect the sacrosanctity of the worker’s home or their leisure time. If there is no contracted statement to the effect of when those forty hours are to take place, it is not technically possible to take a contractarian approach to when they should take place. Another reason contracts might not be followed is if there are informal social pressures or expectations on workers upon which career advancement might be contingent. Some of the abuses of Japanese salarymen are typical of this: The easiest way to understand why they cannot leave before their manager or must socialize after work is not because they have been told to do so, but because there is an informal and therefore impossible-to-contract expectation that, if they want to advance in their careers, they must not be seen to be the first ones leaving the office.

The first point to be made about this is that contracts can and are being followed, which we are seeing now more than ever, both in opposition to firms’ power (e.g., University and College Union 2022; see also Lê and Osserman 2021) and on an everyday basis. Workers are increasingly aware of practices like “quiet hiring” (Castrillon 2023; Knight 2023; Robinson 2023) and “quiet firing” (Brook 2023; Cutter 2023; Hoff 2023; Kayser 2023)—formally, constructive dismissal—and themselves engage in retaliatory practices like “quiet quitting” (Lord 2022; Tapper 2022; Hare 2022) and “malicious compliance” (Scanlan 2018). The corporate tug-of-war is becoming less one-sided. Injustices used to abound in the workplace more easily because workers did not know their rights and stayed at firms for a long time. Now, “job hopping” has become prevalent, with workers rarely staying for long periods at one company (Waikar et al. 2016; Pandey 2019). Workers are more effectively leveraging their positions and are now much more cognizant players in the game. In fact, cases such as at Amazon where workers are held accountable for their time theft and lack of productivity (see Lecher 2019), which is otherwise a ubiquitous phenomenon (Walker 2018), are quite rare. The world of work currently assumes a norm of not working to one’s contract; often when workplaces are “unjust” it is simply because workers are held to the exact terms of their contract, such as being required to work for the full amount of time they are paid for, which might mean they are deprived of “the inalienable right to rest and the use of a bathroom”(Linder and Nygaard 1998), having effectively signed this right away for the duration of their working hours.

This dovetails with another point; namely, that the drafting of and adherence to loose contracts can safeguard workers’ rights as long as there is a mutual understanding that they will also be followed loosely. In the cases of companies like Amazon that follow contracts tightly, then, contracts need to be accordingly detailed. Loose contracts—which most, if not all, employment contracts currently are—can and do result in workplace justice, but sometimes they do not; and when they do not, tight contracts are required that spell out exactly who can do what.

Assuming, then, that my contractarian method for the attainment of workplace justice is adhered to, how might human rights abuses or coercion still obtain? Well, coercion might be written into a contract, resulting in what is essentially contracted oppression. That is to say, the contract has not been consented to in good faith such that the signatories were for some reason forced into accepting a contract to which they did not really want to consent. What forces them to accept the contract is their inability to negotiate. Look, for example, at the “unequal treaties” (fu byōdō jōyaku 不平等条約) imposed on China, Korea, and Japan in the nineteenth century. These “were not negotiated by nations treating each other as equals”—and, therefore, in good faith—but were imposed upon the Orient when it was weak and with the threat of military recourse (Hsu 1970, 239). Likewise, in the workplace, the limits of the employer’s powers are rarely an object of negotiation (Anderson 2017, 53), and there is data to suggest that women are at times paid less than their male counterparts (see Blau and Kahn 2007; Bishu and Alkadry 2017), thus violating their right to equal pay for equal work. It does not follow from the signature of a contract that adherence to it will result in justice if the contract is itself unjust.

Inelastic market conditions can cause workers to enter into essentially unjust contracts, turning what Michael Jensen and William Meckling (1976) and John Tomasi (2012) call a “nexus of contracts” among independent individuals into what Elizabeth Anderson (2017) calls “private governments” and Ronald Coase (1937) calls “islands of conscious power.” The nexus of contracts theory contends that the voluntary, contract-based nature of corporate relationships fundamentally distinguishes them from coercive governmental power. However, I disagree with Armen Alchian and Harold Demsetz (1972), who argue that no coercive authority exists in the workplace because workers are free to exit. An employment contract is the selling of one’s authority over oneself to another: It gives a firm authority over a worker in exchange for a wage. That there can be an employment contract in place but no authority is, by definition, contradictory. This is not only an interpretation but a historical reality: The first wage-labor contracts were in fact contracts for the rental of chattel slaves (Graeber 2004, 37).

It might still be argued that the authority conferred unto a firm by an employment contract is baseless as long as a worker can quit and therefore cancel the contract at whim. But authority cannot be so easily withdrawn, because workers are reliant upon their jobs and their wages, especially those living hand-to-mouth. This sentiment was what underwrote the force of the antebellum equation of “wage work” with “wage slavery” in the United Sates (see Hallgrimsdottir and Benoit 2007). Even when employees technically have the option to exit, the potential cost, whether in terms of lost wages, the difficulty of finding another job, or potential retaliation, can be prohibitively high. As such, the freedom to exit does not necessarily neutralize the authority that employers exert, as it often exists more in theory than in practice given the economic and structural constraints faced by workers.

Something to note about this kind of contracted injustice with respect to the workplace is that, if it is in fact in accordance with my contractarian method toward workplace justice, the human rights of workers cannot be violated, contracted or not. This means that employers cannot pay someone less for equal work, nor can they discriminate against someone by valuing them less because of, for instance, their sex. A company might offer a man $30,000 and a woman $28,000, willing in fact to employ them both at $35,000 dependent on negotiations. What would be unjust would be if they offered them these different sums and were in fact only willing to move to $33,000 for the woman because she is a woman. That is, they deem her less valuable because of her sex. But to make a lowball offer in the first place based on a potentially sexist assumption that women do not negotiate and will take less does not make the company unjust. The moral burden has then been shifted onto the woman in question to refute that sexist stereotype; if she does not, the only injustice done to her is by herself.

A final point to be made about both flouting the employment contract and contracting injustices is that these failures are caused by externalities to the workplace and my contractarian method of attaining justice therein. Part of the reason why workers often go well above and beyond their contracts, especially in the case of salaried work, is because it is rewarded indirectly in the long term with accelerated career advancement. This is, however, a social norm, not a necessary principle of the workplace. Neither is a worker’s powerlessness to negotiate contracts, which is also a contingent feature of society. Whether or not these externalities can be resolved, that the flouting of contracts and contracting of injustices are caused by societal externalities demonstrates that, if it is adhered to—if contracts are signed in good faith and their terms seriously respected—my contractarian method does indeed result in workplace justice. What this shows in turn is that it is conceptually possible for the workplace to be just and equitable.

Case Study

Here I analyze the junior doctors’ contract dispute between the British Medical Association (BMA) and the UK government. This case study demonstrates that the employment contract is a robust mechanism to prevent rights abuses (injustices) in the workplace. It also illustrates that many, particularly trade unions, are already implicitly committed to a contractarian theory of workplace justice insofar as their method for improving working conditions is to change employment contracts.

In 2015–2016, the BMA—the professional association and de facto trade union for doctors in the UK—engaged in a high-profile labor dispute with the government over a new contract for junior doctors in the National Health Service (NHS). The dispute was triggered by the government’s drive to implement a cost-neutral “seven-day NHS” service, citing research that patients admitted on weekends had higher mortality rates (Dyer 2016). Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt sought to introduce a new junior doctor contract extending “normal” working hours (at base pay) to 10 pm on weekdays and to Saturdays, sharply reducing the times that would incur premium pay. Other proposed changes included cutting overtime pay for those working fewer total hours and altering pay progression rules, which junior doctors argued would particularly disadvantage women who took career breaks. Junior doctors’ representatives warned that the contract changes were not merely about pay, but about safety—fearing the erosion of safeguards on working hours would return them to grueling schedules. The BMA also launched a judicial review, accusing the government of breaching equality law by not assessing the contract’s disproportionate impact on female doctors’ careers.

Beginning in January 2016, junior doctors staged a series of strikes that escalated over the ensuing months. Limited stoppages (providing emergency care only) grew into an unprecedented all-out strike on April 26–27, 2016, during which even emergency and critical care were not covered by junior doctors. It was the first time in the NHS’s sixty-eight-year history that a full withdrawal of labor, including emergency services, had occurred. Senior doctors and consultants rallied in support: Thousands signed an open letter backing the junior doctors’ cause while pledging to keep essential services staffed during the forty-eight-hour walkout.

The pressure of repeated strikes compelled all parties back to the negotiating table. In May 2016, talks mediated by the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS) and facilitated by the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges yielded a tentative agreement (Powell 2016). The revised contract offer included several concessions to address doctors’ concerns. Notably, it introduced stricter limits on working hours and rota design to prevent exhaustion: For example, the maximum work week would be reduced from ninety-one to seventy-two hours, no more than four consecutive night shifts or five long day shifts could be rostered, and a new “guardian of safe working” role was created at each hospital to monitor hours and impose fines for breaches. These safeguards aimed to ensure that patient safety and doctors’ well-being would not be compromised by the drive for a seven-day service. The deal also maintained pay supplements for those who worked frequent weekends, while providing an across-the-board basic pay increase of 10–11 percent to compensate for the redefinition of unsocial hours. Other improvements included provisions for better support of doctors with family or caring responsibilities—for instance, a catch-up program for those taking parental leave and facilitated transfers for couples or caregivers—as well as protection for doctors who needed to switch specialties for health or family reasons. These changes reflected many BMA priorities, underlining how the union’s campaign had forced recognition of issues like fatigue, work-life balance, and equality that had initially been sidelined.

However, junior doctors were not satisfied and, in July 2016, BMA members voted by 58 to 42 percent to reject the proposed contract, even though BMA leaders had recommended it as the best achievable outcome. The government, frustrated by the protracted dispute, announced it would proceed with unilaterally implementing the new contract in England despite the BMA’s objections. The BMA’s Junior Doctors Committee, now under new leadership after the chair resigned in the wake of the referendum, initially planned further strikes in late 2016. However, faced with pressures from NHS management and concerns about patient safety, the union ultimately suspended the additional five-day strikes it had scheduled. The imposed contract came into effect in a phased manner from October 2016, and the immediate confrontation subsided without a clear resolution in the doctors’ favor.

The BMA continued to collect evidence on how the imposed contract was affecting doctors on the ground, and the government agreed to a joint review of the contract’s impacts in 2018. In 2019, the BMA and the government finally struck a deal to end the four-year standoff. The new agreement, approved by 82 percent of junior doctors in a referendum, provided a package of improvements: an 8.2 percent cumulative pay rise spread over four years, new limits on weekend frequency, tighter caps on consecutive long shifts, and the introduction of exception reporting and the role of Guardians of Safe Working Hours (GoSWH). It also included enhancements to conditions that the BMA had long advocated, such as better rest facilities and entitlements to shared parental leave, which the BMA hailed as “major strides towards a better future for all junior doctors” (Campbell 2019).

The dispute over junior doctors’ contracts in England from 2015 onward provides a vivid illustration of how robustly drafted and collectively enforced employment contracts can achieve workplace justice in ways that ad hoc management policies cannot. Consider exception reporting: This is a contractual process requiring junior doctors to log every occasion when they worked beyond their scheduled hours, missed a break, or lost training opportunities. These reports triggered automatic remedies: time off in lieu, additional pay, or a formal work schedule review. The guardian role, meanwhile, was established as an independent officer at each trust, outside line management, empowered to monitor these reports, levy financial penalties on departments breaching hours limits, and publish quarterly and annual reports to the hospital board. This was not a policy that could be ignored or revoked; it was a binding obligation written into the contract itself (NHS Employers 2021).

The value of this contractual architecture is evident in the six years that followed. GoSWH reports across trusts provide a transparent, auditable record of hours, breaches, and remedial actions. For instance, Ashford & St Peter’s NHS Trust report that, among 232 doctors in training, there were no instances where the average forty-eight- or seventy-two-hour weekly limits were exceeded and exception reports decreased from 743 to 393 (Gill 2025). Such documents exist precisely because the contract requires guardians to report to the board. Without contractual obligation, this form of routine assurance would not exist.

Further research confirms that exception reporting has functioned as a meaningful enforcement mechanism. A review found that, while exception reporting was initially under-used—recording only about 1.2 percent of occasions when juniors worked beyond contracted hours—where it was used, it produced tangible outcomes such as rota changes, additional pay, or compensatory rest (Roycroft 2020). Other service evaluations describe exception reporting as an “an effective way to increase compliance leading to improvements in working conditions” (Senn et al. 2021). Cultural barriers and fear of reprisal limited uptake in the early years (Manning et al. 2018; Vaidya et al. 2020), but subsequent contractual reforms in 2025 strengthened exception reporting further by removing line managers from the process, extending reporting windows, and directing reports straight to HR and guardians, closing loopholes and reinforcing enforceability.

The normative point here is that the contract translated abstract rights—such as the right to rest and leisure—into operationalized, enforceable entitlements. A trust cannot plausibly promise informally to monitor hours, because informal policies lack remedies. By embedding exception reporting, fines, and independent guardians into the contract, the BMA created a governance infrastructure that compels compliance and produces transparent evidence of it. This is precisely what ad hoc management decisions cannot provide. A rota manager may pledge to avoid unsafe hours, but only a contract makes it a breach, triggering automatic remedy, escalation to the board, and public accountability.

Moreover, the dispute demonstrates the iterative improvement that contracts enable. Because the framework was contractual, it became the object of systematic review in 2018 and renegotiation in 2019, culminating in an agreement supported by 82 percent of junior doctors. This revised contract further strengthened limits on consecutive long shifts, secured an 8.2 percent pay rise over four years, and enhanced parental leave entitlements. These refinements would not have been possible if working conditions had rested solely on employer policies. Policies can change unilaterally; contracts demand agreement.

The BMA case thus provides empirical backing for a contractarian conception of workplace justice. Where human rights norms such as the right to rest and freedom from degrading treatment are vulnerable to erosion by managerial prerogative, the employment contract offers a medium through which they can be specified, enforced, and remedied. The junior doctors’ contract since 2016 has not solved the wider structural problems of the NHS, but it has demonstrated that contractual clauses such as exception reporting, independent guardians, board reporting, and financial penalties can materially restrain coercion and create a culture of accountability.

Conclusion

In this study, I have defined workplace justice in contractarian terms and have devised a general contractarian method for achieving it. What this shows is that workplaces can be just and equitable spaces. In fact, many are, and with much looser contracts than my method implies.

My framework for workplace justice does not take place in a closed system, however: The workplace is part of society, and there are wider societal factors that might prevent this framework from obtaining in the first place. I cannot here tackle the many problems with the larger system that might impact the application of my theory to the workplace, but what is clear is that any injustice that might still occur in the workplace does not represent a failure in the governance of the system (workplace) by the theory, but from an external second-order failure where the theory does not obtain; that is, with the social norms that make injustice standard.

Often, the problems with workplace justice arise not from policy, but from a cultural failure to adhere to the policies we have in place. In practice, it is not that the workplace is inherently unjust, or that there are no principles to ensure workplace justice, but that the principles we have—i.e., human rights and the employment contract—are not respected. All I have really proposed here is for these basic principles that we already have to be followed rather than flouted. I leave it to another to work out how we can ensure that this happens.