The Contract
The wrath of Achilles, sung at the opening of the Iliad, begins with a broken contract. Briseis had been formally awarded to Achilles as his war prize. The compact among the Greek nobility was clear: spoils belonged to the warrior who had taken possession of them, and that right was binding. When Agamemnon, the more powerful man, seized Briseis to compensate for his own loss, he broke that compact. Achilles withdrew from the fighting. The Greek campaign began to unravel. The war turned, and even the gods were drawn into the consequences. Western literature opens with the question of what happens when a powerful party decides that contracts bind everyone else but not itself.
Contracts are not just legal formalities. They are moral commitments. They are how people bind their future selves to one another against the chance that power, mood, convenience, or expediency will later suggest another course. Hannah Arendt called the capacity to make and keep promises the political act par excellence. Without it, she argued, no future could be planned, no institution could endure, and no relationship could outlast the moment of its making. A promise allows people to plan on the assumption that words will hold. Contracts are promises written down, made between parties for whom a handshake is no longer enough.
At the center of labor history is this question: what keeps a powerful party from breaking a contract? The answer is not virtue. Institutions do not honor contracts for moral reasons. They honor them when enough opposing power makes breaking them costly. That power takes many forms: organized resistance, public scrutiny, litigation, political pressure, and historical memory. E.P. Thompson, writing about the 18th-century English crowd, described an older form of restraint: a moral economy, a shared sense of what was owed and what counted as fair. That sense was enforced not by goodwill but by the willingness of working people to resist reforms that stripped custom of its substance. When that moral economy was strong, contracts were more likely to hold. As those restraints weakened, contractual protections did as well. Unchecked power turned contracts into guidelines. Without enforcement, guidelines became rhetoric. By that point, the relationship between subject parties had already been abandoned.
Recent history offers many examples. In 2012, Hostess Brands used bankruptcy proceedings to void union contracts and shed pension obligations, ending the employment of workers who had spent decades under terms they believed were secure. The maneuver was lawful under the bankruptcy code. That the maneuver was lawful did not change what it did to those workers.
In Wisconsin, Act 10 stripped public-sector workers of collective bargaining rights on a sweeping scale, turning decades of negotiated agreements into hollow administrative remnants. At Bennington College in 1994, 27 faculty members, including tenured professors, were dismissed in a single afternoon under the label of “presidential reorganization.” At Antioch College in 2007, retirees learned that pension obligations would not be honored when the institution closed. During the pandemic, similar patterns appeared at institutions such as Ithaca College, Marquette University, and the University of Akron, where faculty contracts were treated as subordinate to enrollment shifts and budget stress.
In each case, the institution relied on procedure as its method. Bankruptcy law allowed it. Legislative authority sanctioned it. Board action approved it. Financial necessity demanded it. But that method answers a different question from the one the contract was supposed to settle. A contract sets terms in advance. It marks what can be done and what cannot. The procedural maneuver says only that the stronger party has found a way around those terms. A contract that can be set aside whenever the stronger party faces enough pressure is not really a contract. It is a wager. The weaker party is betting that the conditions under which the stronger party will keep its word will continue to hold. When those conditions change, the wager fails.
Institutions often violate contracts through a familiar deceit. They rarely deny the importance of contracts outright. Instead, they claim to be honoring them through procedure. The grievance is filed. The hearing is held. The records are produced. The written response is issued. Procedure is followed even as the promise itself is set aside. The form of the contract becomes cover for violating its substance. A worker who reads the documents closely and tries to recover that substance is told that substance is open to interpretation, while procedural rulings are final. The procedures, meanwhile, have usually been designed by the party they protect.
The Iliad shows clearly what modern institutional language often tries to obscure. A broken contract does not damage only the immediate parties. Achilles withdrew, and the Greek campaign faltered. It faltered not simply because Achilles was a great warrior but because his withdrawal taught every other Greek noble the same lesson: what had been awarded to one man could be taken from another by the same authority. The agreement that held the campaign together had been broken, and everyone could see what that meant. Each fighter now had to measure his own standing against that reality. The soldiers had learned what their leaders could do. The campaign continued, but the war had changed.
Broken institutional contracts teach the same lesson today. The faculty member who watches a colleague laid off out of order reads the precedent. The pensioner who watches a bankruptcy court erase obligations reads the precedent. The public-sector worker who watches a legislature strip bargaining rights reads the precedent. The lesson is precise: the contract means whatever the institution decides it means.
The first remedy for institutional contract violation is not legal. Law comes later. The first remedy is recognition: saying clearly that a contract has been broken and naming what the institution has done. That matters because the main weapon of contractual evasion is the claim that no violation has occurred, that procedures were followed, that the institution acted in good faith within the agreement. When that claim goes unanswered, the institution’s version prevails. When it is challenged, the violation at least becomes visible. Whether it is then remedied depends on other forms of power: courts, public opinion, political pressure, and collective action by those affected. But recognition comes first.
At the opening of the Iliad, the wrath of Achilles is named, sung, and remembered. Without that act of naming, a precedent stands unchallenged.