7 Ga. App. 276 | Ga. Ct. App. | 1910
Beeder sued the W. J. Oliver Construction Comjoany for certain damages which he alleged he had sustained by reason of the fact that the defendant had agreed to give him continuous employment for two years in the grading of a certain railroad which was being built, and had failed to do so. To state the testimony most favorably to the plaintiff (for the verdict of the jury in his favor entitles him to have his case thus viewed), he made an oral agreement with the company, which was then engaged as contractor in the construction of a railroad from Statesboro, Georgia, to Chattanooga, Tennessee, that if he would bring his teams, laborers, and grading outfit from the place in Tennessee where they were then located, to the point where the work was being done, the company would give him employment for grading a specified two-miles of the work, at the price of seventeen cents per cubic yard, and further continuous employment for a period of two yrears, at such price, not less than seventeen ■ cents per cubic yard, as the parties might thereafter agree upon. After the two miles of grading were completed, and after he had been furnished certain other' temporary work to do, the company failed to give him further employment; because of which his loss .ensued. lie measured his. losses by the amounts he had to pay out on account of his teams, etc.,having been idle, and on account of having to sell his mules at less than the market price because of the situation in which he was-left when the company failed to give him further work. Substantially this state of facts was set up in the petition; and possibly.
It would be profitless for us to elaborate the proposition that a contract, to be enforceable, must be mutual. Negotiations, propositions, and tentative understandings between parties do not become contracts until both parties are bound. Especially is this true as to contracts resting on mutual promises or undertakings. Generally speaking, if one party can not hold the other to the terms of the contract and compel him to perform under it, or bring an action against him for his refusal to perform, the transaction is unilateral, and no contract exists as against either party.
Take the present case: the plaintiffs action necessarily rests upon 'the proposition that the defendant broke the alleged contract by refusing to give him employment at seventeen cents per cubic yard for the grading; for there is no pretense that they ever agreed on any higher sum. Now suppose that the defendant had demanded •of the plaintiff that he go to a point where the grading would be very difficult and expensive, so much so that he would have lost
If this negotiation between the parties had taken on such definiteness as to become a contract, the plaintiff’s measure of damage for a breach of it by the defendant’s failure to furnish tile promised work would primarily have been the difference between what it would have cost him to do the work and the price at which he had agreed to do it. So too, if it turned out that the plaintiff had made a losing contract, i. e., had contracted to do- work at a price less than what it would have cost him to do it, the defendant would have had the right to show this fact in diminution of the damages that would otherwise be assessable on the theory that the plaintiff' had expended time and money in preparation toward performing-the contract. In other words, the plaintiff could have recovered from the defendant only his net loss, by reason of the defendant’s, failure to allow him to do the work. Hence it may be seen how important it is that the question of price should have been fixed between the parties, or else left in such shape that, by reason of the-absence of agreement on the subject, the law itself could have fixed the price. The plaintiff had doubtless suffered loss, but he is. merely in the unfortunate condition of one who, in the anticipation of making a contract, and led on by the belief that he could satis