yellow-dog contract
- noun
- /ˈjɛloʊ dɔg ˈkɒntrækt/
- Archaic
:
contrato de perro amarillo
- Owners also forced workers to sign yellow dog contracts which banned them from joining unions.
Owners also forced workers to sign yellow dog contracts which banned them from joining unions.
- Owners also forced workers to sign yellow dog contracts which banned them from joining unions.
Examples
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During the early 20th century, many workers were coerced into signing yellow-dog contracts to secure their jobs.
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Employers once required new hires to sign a yellow-dog contract that prohibited them from joining any trade union.
-
The union organizers fought against the unfairness of yellow-dog contracts, which kept employees from joining their ranks.
Antonyms
Surface Forms
Morphology
yellow-dog + contract
Although 'contract' transparently signals a written agreement, the modifier 'yellow-dog' is not compositional from 'yellow' + 'dog' and does not indicate the anti-union meaning. This is a historically specific idiom whose sense ('promise not to join a trade union') cannot be derived by a B1 learner who only knows the constituent words.
Etymology
Yellow-dog contract comes from an old insult: a yellow-dog meant a coward. Employers made workers sign a yellow-dog contract to promise 'not to join a trade union', so the name paints the worker as weak for staying out of the union, and such agreements are now 'illegal'.
