Baldintza: how to check an overseas employment contract

1. 01

   The problem

   People leaving to work in another country are often handed the contract minutes before signing, in a language they only half read, and told it is the standard one. With one contract in hand, nobody can tell which line is unusual, because no worker gets to see two of them side by side.

   In my design brief the example is a made-up cleaner, handed a four-page contract in English and Arabic at the airport, ninety minutes before his flight, with other men waiting behind him.

2. 02

   The plan I wrote

   The worker photographs every page and checks each picture. The app finds the numbered clauses and matches each one to a plain family, such as working hours, annual leave, passport custody, housing, transport, salary or notice period.

   Beside each clause, a bar shows how often that family appears in contracts other workers have shared for the same destination and the same broad kind of work. Where the contract is in English and Arabic, the app lines up the clause numbers, points out where an obligation or a number differs, and shows both versions side by side.

   It reports how common a clause is. It never says a clause is legal or illegal, it never names a company or a person, and it never tells anyone whether to sign.

3. 03

   The build

   AI coding agents built it from my written specification. My part was the plan and its refusals: no legal advice, no names, no page pictures leaving the phone, and the reading works for a worker who shares nothing at all.

4. 04

   What can leave the phone

   Sharing is optional. A shared clause is only a pattern and its numbers, such as “working time is [HOURS] hours per day” with 8 hours a day. The server accepts no page picture and no clause text.

   Before anything is shared, names, document numbers, organizations, dates, signatures, stamps, photographs and handwriting are left out. Then a second check runs over the result. If it is not sure, nothing is sent, the app says so, and the worker still has the reading.

   A clause family stays hidden until at least seven different phones have shared it, over at least two days. Until then the margin says “Not enough yet”, with no count. One phone counts once, so a flood of uploads from one phone cannot make a clause look normal: in a test, 50 uploads from one phone moved a visible number by less than one point.

5. 05

   What I have checked, and what I have not

   Twenty made-up contracts, each with one planted name, one ID number and one employer name: all 60 were removed. That is this test set, not every name a contract can hold.

   A test clause that says eight hours in English and ten in Arabic was flagged, and the matching annual-leave clause next to it was left alone. A four-page test contract picture, tilted and shaded, was read on two devices, an Honor Pad X7 tablet and a Galaxy Z Flip4 phone: all 12 numbered clauses were found. The signed release opened 10 screens on both with no crash. With the radios off, a shared item waited, and it was sent when they came back.

   What I have not done: the camera has not read a real paper contract yet. On the test devices the cameras were covered, so those reads used a saved page picture. No real contract and no real worker appear in my records. And I cannot see how many workers have shared so far, so on most routes the margin may still say “Not enough yet”.

6. 06

   Where it stands

   “Baldintza: Contract Clauses” is live on Google Play. It shows how common a clause is and where two language versions differ. It is not legal advice, and it does not tell anyone to sign or not to sign.

   If you help workers going abroad and can try it on a real contract, I would like to hear what it gets wrong. Email me.

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