I worked as an English teacher for a private for-profit academy in South Korea for seven years. Every year, I had to sign a new contract so that they wouldn't have to consider me an employee and give benefits. One day, they got busted by the labor board because according to our contracts, we should have been considered employees the whole time. So they came to us all happy, announcing we were about to be employees instead of freelancers, and acted as though it was a favor they were doing us.
They told us all we had to sign NEW contracts and void our old ones to make it happen, even though the whole problem was that according to our contracts we already were employees.
These new contracts were a mess. Halving our vacation time, taking away our sick days, adding more work, and offering generally worse conditions all around. Unfortunately, many folks felt they still had to sign.
But then I noticed two different clauses in the contracts that combined would have been ruinous.
(1) A clause that said we would have to stay after work any time requested of us and create teaching materials to their specifications that the company would own the copyright to, and could be used in all of their centers across the country as long as they wanted. We would not be paid extra for this. (this was already a dealbreaker for me. This was my day job, I am an author and illustrator professionally, and making things like this is a job I get paid for.)
(2) We had to sign a document taking all responsibility for any materials we created. It specifically said that if the company were to be sued for copyright infringement over something we made, we would be held financially liable, even if we no longer worked there.
Before we even had time to read over the contract, they were already demanding we all create powerpoints and told us to use images from the student's textbooks. Images that they do not own the copyright for.
I explained in an all-staff meeting that this put us at unlimited liability. I found a handful of images they wanted us to use on Shutterstock, Getty Images, and other websites and showed them how much they cost to license, and pointed out all of the class activities they had forced staff to make in the past using Disney IP. They could ask us to make a Frozen book, use it for 20 years in 100 centers, get sued, find us, and force us to pay every dime.
The boss told me in front of everyone that I was being paranoid. I asked her if she would sign a paper taking legal responsibility for anything she personally asked us to do, and she said “of course not, why would I do that.”
They were shocked that so many people quit. After all, they were doing us a “favor” by offering us new contracts. I was scared to leave, not knowing how I'd pay my bills. But a few days after I left, I got offered a book deal equal to the entire amount of take home pay I'd made in the whole seven years at my day job. Best day of my life.