Turns out they're right, they can put whatever they want in a contract. And again, they are correct that their wage slaves will 99.99% of the time sign whatever paper he pushes in front of them while saying "as a condition of your continued employment, [...]".
But also it turns out that just because you signed something doesn't mean that's it. My friends (all of us young twenty-something software engineers much more familiar with transaction isolation semantics than with contract law) consulted with an attorney.
The TLDR is that:
- nothing in contract law is in perpetuity
- there MUST be consideration for each side (where "consideration" means getting something. something real. like USD. "continued employment" is not consideration.)
- if nothing is perpetual, then how long can it last supposing both sides do get ongoing consideration from it? the answer is, the judge will figure it out.
- and when it comes to employers and employees, the employee had damn well better be getting a good deal out of it, especially if you are trying to prevent the employee (or ex-employee) from working.
A common pattern ended up emerging: our employer would put something perpetual in the contract, and offer no consideration. Our attorney would tell us this isn't even a valid contract and not to worry about it. Employer would offer an employee some nominal amount of USD in severance and put something in perpetuity into the contract. Our attorney tells us the judge would likely use "blue ink rule" to add in "for a period of one year", or, it would be prorated based on the amount of money they were given relative to their former salary.
(I don't work there anymore, naturally).
Isn't that the reason more competent lawyers put in the royal lives[1] clause? It specifies the contract is valid until 21 years after the death of the last currently-living royal descendant; I believe the youngest one is currently 1 year old, and they all have good healthcare, so it's almost certainly will be beyond the lifetime of any currently-employed persons.
Would any non-corrupt judge consider this is done in bad fait?
How is this difference if we use a great ancient sea turtles—or some other long-lived organism—instead of the current royal family baby? Like, I guess my point is anything that would likely outlive the employee basically?
A case where it obviously makes sense is something like a covenant between two companies; whose life would be relevant there, if both parties want the contract to last a long time and have to pick one? The CEOs? Employees? Shareholders? You could easily have a situation where the company gets sold and they all leave, but the contract should still be relevant, and now it depends on the lives of people who are totally unconnected to the parties. Just makes things difficult. Using a monarch and his currently living descendants is easy.
I'm not sure how relevant it is in a more employer employee context. But it's a formalism to create a very long contract that's easy to track, not a secret trick to create a longer contract than you're normally allowed to. An employer asking an employee to agree to it would have no qualms asking instead for it to last the employee's life, and if the employee's willing to sign one then the other doesn't seem that much more exploitative.