Overview of the Question

386. Arrangement of the question. That principal modern question in which the mutual relations of workers and employers must be defined seems to us to embrace chiefly three parts, which we shall treat in as many chapters. Accordingly, we shall speak in order:

1. Of the form of the contract by which labor is promised;
2. Of its justice, and particularly of a just wage;
3. Of the consequent relationship, or of the mutual duties of the employers of a business and the workers; to which chapter
4. We shall append the minor question concerning those pacts and agreements by which, as the encyclical Rerum novarum says, workmen “by concerted action cease from work” and imitate a certain secession of the plebs. These will be called by us, in one word, work stoppages (operistitia).

387. In what sense we speak of the form of the contract. Lest, from an intention wrongly understood, we seem at the outset to incur some censure, it is useful to explain accurately what, in the first part, we call the form of the contract. For the form of a contract can designate whatever either constitutes or follows upon the contract; or, if you prefer, together with the consent itself, whatever right and duty arises from the consent or on the occasion of the consent. Or it can be taken more strictly for the very kind of stipulation and, as it were, its first essence. Then nothing is considered except the object of mutual consent and the effects of which consent is the immediate cause. Thus a deposit and the hiring of a thing entail some care of the thing, which nevertheless does not belong to the form or essence strictly taken, but follows upon both kinds of stipulation.

Now we take form in the first part in this latter and restricted manner; that is, we consider the contract in fieri [in its being made], and not in facto esse [in its completed state]. For an adequate account of the contract¹ can be proposed only at the end of the question.

¹ Thus in French they are accustomed to discuss more broadly du contrat de travail [the labor contract].