Your Job May Involve a Quid Pro Quo

You might have a job. Some of you have a written employment contract. Most of you do not.

To make a little more sense of today’s impeachment proceedings, I offer an employment law case that roughly parallels our political discourse on quid pro quos and related.

Wayne Pugh worked for more than 30 for See’s Candies, a fresh-candy maker based in California. He rose from the bottom to Senior VP. 
He had no written contract. 
In the 1950s, the principal owner and CEO, Laurence See, had an oral agreement with all of his managerial employees: You have the same “for cause” employment security as our union-represented workers in the plant. 
The agreement was never rescinded or modified.

The meaning of “for cause” might not be clear to you— but to a See’s employee, this meant you wouldn’t be fired unless the Company had a good cause to terminate you. Now, granted, even that term is vague—but it means that there must be some justification given, and some due process to rebut an allegation of wrongdoing, before a See’s worker or manager could be fired.

Wayne Pugh was summoned to the CEO’s office one day in the late 1970s. 
Laurence See had long-since passed away. 
The-then CEO told Mr. Pugh to “look in the mirror” because he was being fired on the spot. He was given time to clean out his 30+ years of office possessions and was escorted off the property. 
(Pugh was fired because he uncovered and blew the whistle on a corrupt, under-the-table bribe from another VP to a union officer, in exchange for the union granting concessions to See's ... um, another quid pro quo in this story.)

Pugh sued, claiming he had an employment contract. 
See’s Candies said, “No. Pugh has no contract. A contract must be in writing.”

Any first year law student would tell you that the Company was right.

But Pugh won his case. The California Supreme Court said that Mr. See’s vague oral promise from the 1950s, backed by the authority of his office, and including lots of corroborating evidence that he meant what he said, all meant that Mr. Pugh was working on an “implied oral contract.” 
If you’re following along, that’s a bit of a contradiction—after all, a contract must be in writing!

But not when the oral exchange of understandings, backed by actual events, re-creates the actualities of a written contract.
Here, there was a quid pro quo: Be loyal to See’s—don’t quit and especially don’t work for our competitors. In return for your loyalty, we will forego our right to fire you at-will, and will preserve your job security, unless you give us good cause to fire you.

Whatever your political leanings, I hope this story helps to clarify what a quid pro quo is in the context of an agreement. It's not necessarily sinister: in fact, many quid pro quos are perfectly legitimate. 
It is a meeting of minds, where one benefit is exchanged for another benefit.