G.R. No. 11102. January 28, 1918
H. C. BEST, PLAINTIFF AND APPELLEE, VS. LIZARRAGA HERMANOS, DEFENDANT AND APPELLANT.
STREET, J.:
a mercantile partnership, to take charge of the sugar central “Bearin,”
belonging to the firm and situated in the municipality of Kabankalan, Occidental
Negros. It was agreed that Best should be the superintendent, or technical head
of the central; that he should be responsible at all times for good service and
order, and that the entire personnel, mechanical, technical, and scientific,
should be under his control, so far as regards service. The contract, which was
evidenced by a letter written by the defendants, was to run from the time when
Best should assume the duties of his position till the end of April or 1st of
May of the next year. The salary of the plaintiff was to be at the rate of P450
per month, with board, lodging, laundry service, and attendance of servant.
Soon after the plaintiff assumed the performance of his duties under this
contract (April 8, 1914) difficulties arose; and serious misunderstandings
developed between him and his employers. A crisis was reached in the latter part
of July and early days of August, when both parties seem to have arrived at the
conclusion that the situation was unendurable, and the plaintiff left.
Upon September 11, 1914, he instituted this action, claiming damages of the
defendant for breach of the contract of employment. At the hearing in the Court
of First Instance judgment was rendered in his favor for the sum of P4,818.25,
with interest; and from this judgment the defendant has appealed,
The theory of the plaintiff’s case is that he was in effect discharged by his
employers without legal justification. The defense is based on the assertion
that the plaintiff was technically incompetent; that he mistreated the employees
and displayed such lack of tact in his relations with his inferiors that
disorder resulted, as a consequence of which his continued stay at the central
in the capacity of superintendent would have been unsafe for him and disastrous
to the interests of the house.
The Court of First Instance found that the plaintiff was technically
competent to discharge the duties of the position which he was employed to fill;
and we think that this finding is sustained by the proof. He had ample
experience in such matters, and the changes introduced by him in the central
were, we think, such as any competent superintendent might have adopted.
Upon the question whether the plaintiff quit the position or was discharged
by his employers, the court below arrived at the conclusion that the plaintiff
was not in terms discharged by the defendants but that he himself quit the
contract. We think this is the proper conclusion to be drawn from the evidence
on this point. The trial court also found that there was not the slightest doubt
that he was forced to quit. The conditions which necessitated the taking of this
step are not clearly exhibited in the decision of the court below, but they will
be here briefly stated, as the proper solution of the case requires us to
determine who was to blame for those conditions.
To begin with, the place was a hard one to fill, as the establishment was not
well organized, nor the force of employees well disciplined. Best had no
previous experience in dealing with Filipino laborers, and his inability to
communicate directly with them, and most of the other employees under him, led
to misunderstandings and trouble. The difficulties of the situation were
increased by the circumstance that one of the members of the firm of Lizarraga
Hermanos, who was present at the central and assumed a superior authority with
respect to the management of the hacienda, failed to give the support to Best
which possibly might have made things go smoothly. In early June word had
reached the head office of the firm in Iloilo to the effect that things were not
going well at Kabankalan; that Best by his brusqueness and lack of tact had
incurred the ill-will of his subordinates; and that dissension was developing in
the establishment. About the same time Best himself was complaining of a lack of
subordination and of interference with his authority. Therefore, upon June 6,
1914, a letter was written from Iloilo, in reply to one received from Best. In
this letter Lizarraga Hermanos told Best that they would take the necessary
steps to make the entire personnel realize that he was superintendent and that
they owed obedience to him in everything relating to the work. In the same
letter the head of the firm proceeded at some length to give Best advice about
how to manage Filipino labor. We think that these suggestions were well
intended, and that Best would have done well to profit by them. He says,
however, that he paid no attention to that letter.
A short while after this, upon a certain occasion, Best had an altercation
with a Filipino contractor of labor, and some thirty laborers who were at hand
intervened by stoning Best. The incident made a deep impression on everybody
around the central and hacienda, and the senior member of the house came up from
Iloilo to investigate. After examining into the situation thoroughly for a few
days he found that the entire personnel was disaffected, and that if the
superintendent should be retained a number of other employees would probably
quit. As a consequence a conference was held between the members of the firm who
were then present at Kabankalan and Best; and upon this occasion they asked him
to resign and offered, if he would do so, to pay his salary a month or two in
advance. This he refused to do, but the next day, as the company’s launch was
returning to Iloilo, he embarked and did not return.
Our conclusions, after repeated and careful examination of the evidence in
this case are these: (1) That when the conference above mentioned was held both
parties to this contract recognized that under the conditions which had arisen
the continuance of Best as superintendent of the central was impracticable, if
not impossible, and that the only sensible course to be pursued was for him to
leave; (2) that the conditions which made this step necessary resulted chiefly
from the inability of Best to fulfill the requirements of that part of his
contract which made him responsible “at all times for good service and order;”
(3) that Lizarraga Hermanos were not immediately responsible for the conditions
which made Best’s departure necessary, although their course was in many
respects subject to criticism; (4) that no right of action arose whereby the
plaintiff became entitled to recover anything by way of damages for breach of
contract; but (5) that inasmuch as he left with the consent of his employers he
is entitled to recover what was earned upon salary account up to the date of his
departure.
It will be observed that the burden of proof is upon the plaintiff in this
action to show that the defendants were responsible for the conditions which
forced him to quit; and undoubtedly if it were shown that the trouble which
developed was fomented by a member of the house of Lizarraga Hermanos or that
they, in violation of their own obligations, otherwise created intolerable
conditions in order to force him out, the action of Best in leaving would have
been justified. Some irritating things were certainly done to the vexation of
the plaintiff by more than one member of the firm; but these things were not so
vital in the contractual relations of the parties as the inability of the
plaintiff to adjust his own methods to the requirements of the situation assumed
by him under the contract.
Even assuming that both parties to the contract were equally to blame for the
conditions which led to this rupture, the plaintiff could not recover; for in
order to maintain an action for a breach of contract the plaintiff must prove
that he was forced out by conditions created without fault of his own. Where
both parties are to blame, the fault of one may be considered to offset that of
the other; and the legal result is that while either may quit, neither can
maintain an action for breach of contract against the other. In such case we
consider the situation to be substantially the same as if the contract had
become impracticable or impossible of performance without the fault of either,
and had been dissolved by mutual consent.
There is another point in the case deserving of notice. Upon August 11, 1914,
upon being informed that the plaintiff would assert a claim for damages arising
from the alleged breach of contract, Lizarraga Hermanos addressed a letter to
Best’s attorneys in Iloilo, in which after denying that the firm had violated
the contract, they stated that he could return to the position of superintendent
at Kabankalan, if he wished. This offer to receive him back was coupled with
conditions substantially the same as those under which he had been originally
employed. It has been held by this court that an offer on the part of an
employer, made in good faith, to take back a discharged employee on the same
terms as before, is admissible in evidence, and if refused without good reason,
has the effect of destroying the right of the employee to recover damages from
the date when such offer should have been accepted. (Lemoine vs. Alkan,
33 Phil. Rep., 162.) It is true that in this communication Lizarraga Hermanos
inserted some words which tended to irritate rather than soothe; but it is
nevertheless questionable whether Best was not bound to return to duty in
response to that invitation, and in our opinion the letter should have been
admitted in evidence, in order that its effect might have been considered.
Instead of this it was rejected by the court below as irrelevant.
From what has been said it follows that the judgment must be reversed in so
far as it awards damages in respect to the salary that would have accrued under
the contract after the date of the plaintiff’s departure from Kabankalan, but as
already suggested, the plaintiff is entitled to recover for the value of his
services prior to that date. Upon this point we find that the plaintiff was
entitled to his salary for four months, less two days, or the sum of P1,771. On
the question as to how much the plaintiff had been paid upon salary account, we
find no competent proof in the record other than his own statement, in which he
says that he had been paid the sum of P730. In the opinion written by the trial
judge it is said that the lawyer for the plaintiff has stated that the plaintiff
had been paid about P1,400 during his term of service; but there is no evidence
to support this statement, and we are unwilling to base a judgment of this court
upon such a suggestion unsupported by proof. It seems to us that if the
statement made by Best had been erroneous, it was the duty of the defendants to
correct it. Judgment will accordingly be here entered in favor of the plaintiff
for the sum of one thousand and forty-one pesos (P1,041) with interest from
September 11, 1914, but without any special findings as to costs of this
instance. So ordered.
Arellano, C. J., Torres, Carson, Araullo, Malcolm, and Avanceña,
JJ., concur.