40 Conn. 371 | Conn. | 1873
The plaintiff entered into the employment of the defendant as an operative in his mill for certain stipulated daily wages, but for no specified time, under a contract which contained a provision that the plaintiff should give fourteen days previous notice to the defendant before leaving Ins employment.
It is admitted that the plaintiff continued in the service of the defendant only about a month, and that he wrongfully violated the contract by leaving without notice. The defendant thereby claims to have suffered damage, which he seeks to recoup against the plaintiff’s claim for services, and the question is, whether the Court of Common Pleas adopted the proper rule in ascertaining the amount which the defendant was entitled to recoup.
It appears from the record 1hat Ihe plaintiff’s employment was to tend a spinning jack, and that it was necessary that the jack should be kept running or some of the defendant’s looms must stop, and that by the plaintiff’s leaving the jack was idle for three working days.
The court adopted as the rule of the defendant’s damages the amount of the plaintiff’s wages for those three days, and did not take into consideration the injury to the defendant by the stoppage of his jack and looms.
The proper rule in such cases is the actual injury sustained by the breach of the contract, but it must not be of a character so uncertain and indefinite as to be incapable of such proof as should reasonably satisfy the mind of the court, and enable it to come to a satisfactory conclusion that the damage amounts to at least a certain precise and definite sum. We experience some embarrassment from the fact that, from the somewhat ambiguous phraseology of the motion, we are not certain of adopting the meaning of the court. If it clearly appeared from the record that the defendant’s evidence was
In fixing the defendant’s damages at the amount of the plaintiff’s wages for three days, and thereby establishing as the rule of compensation for a breach of contract by wrongfully leaving the defendant’s employment, the simple wages of the plaintiff, or what it would have cost to pay another man for the same service, the court adopted a principle which if sanctioned can hardly fail to bear oppressively upon man
In the argument some importance was attached to the fact that no evidence was introduced to show whether the defendant’s mill was being run at a profit. We think this could have had no material effect on the mind of the court in the determination of this question. If the mill was in fact running at a loss, wo can see no more propriety in assessing damages' equivalent to the wages of the plaintiff than for the interruption of the defendant’s business by the suspension of his machines. If it was a disadvantage to the defendant to have his machines kept in motion, it must on the samo principle have been equally injurious to have kept workmen employed to tend the machines.
We advise a new trial.
In this opinion the other judges concurred.