Comic employment contracts for farm workers in South Africa

Hat tip to Helena Haapio for forwarding me this article out of South Africa about comic-book version of contracts that has been created and distributed by a fruit company, for a contract with its farm workers. A lawyer for the company, Clemengold, named Robert de Rooy created a booklet of visuals and narratives to present the terms of the contract.

Visual Contract - Clemengold employee visual contract

It’s a binding document, aimed at employees who cannot read or have difficulty with formal legal language. It’s an employment contract aimed at actually having the employee understand the terms, and have a more equal power balance among the parties. Rather than employees signing a document that they haven’t read and don’t understand, the goal of the visual narrative contract is to (1) engage the person so they pay attention to the contract in the first place and (2) use graphics, stories, and other unusual (for law) design choices to convey the terms so the person can make sense of them — and decide how to respond and behave accordingly.

Here’s more details at an article by FreshPlaza, with more information about this Comic book contract.