feat(offer-prep): sub-statutory terms check — jurisdiction floors table + statutory-context notes + lawyer questions - #2042

Closes #2039. Tenth member of the jurisdiction-compliance umbrella (#2026) — the second offer-document-surface member and the direct sibling of #2028/#2029: same mode, same two integration touchpoints, same pin patterns. Reviewing it next to #2029 should be near-zero marginal cost. Like #2029, it lives in modes/offer-prep.md, not oferta's Block G, so it is outside the Signal-9 coordination queue entirely.

What this adds

Prompt/instruction + data-template PR — no new executable script.

1. templates/statutory-employment-minimums.yml — jurisdiction-keyed table of employment-standards floors. Per entry: {jurisdiction, jurisdiction_name, floors: {vacation, notice, severance, probation_limits — only whichever the jurisdiction actually defines}, void_doctrine (nullable), legal_basis, sources, as_of}. Seeded with exactly one verified row:

   • CA-ON: ESA floors — vacation 2 weeks (3 after five years, ss. 33-34), termination notice up to 8 weeks by service (s. 57) with the sub-3-month no-notice window noted (s. 54; O. Reg. 288/01 s. 8(1) — the ESA's "probation" reality), severance where applicable up to 26 weeks (ss. 63-65). void_doctrine: Waksdale v. Swegon North America (2020 ONCA 391) — termination provisions read as a whole; if ANY part violates the ESA (including a never-invoked "for cause" section defining cause more broadly than the wilful-misconduct standard, O. Reg. 288/01 s. 2(1)3), the ENTIRE provision is void, no severance of the bad part, common-law reasonable notice applies; ONCA declined to revisit in Dufault (2024); applied case line Sewell / Lamontagne / Perretta / Kopyl / Bertsch. Sources: Littler, Epstein Becker Green, HTW Law, Employment Law Boutique commentaries. as_of: "2026-07-18".

   Header carries the series contribution rule plus the table's signature semantics: floors are listed only where the jurisdiction defines them — an absent field/row means no floor is recorded and the check stays SILENT. That is the designed "US case" (no federal vacation floor), not an omission: absence is meaningful, and the architecture handles "no floor here" as gracefully as "floor undercut". Candidate rows in comments only (UK ERA s.86 / WTR 5.6 weeks; Germany BGB §622 / BUrlG 24 Werktage; France 5 weeks congés payés + convention-collective pointer; EU WTD 4-week baseline; Japan LSA art. 39; US deliberately absent). All dates are quoted YAML strings (the feat(oferta): minimum-wage floor check — jurisdiction table + date-aware wage-floor signal #2027 timezone lesson).

2. modes/offer-prep.md — a "Statutory-context notes for sub-statutory terms (feat(offer-prep): sub-statutory terms check — flag offer clauses below the jurisdiction's employment-standards floors (ESA/Waksdale, UK ERA/WTR, BGB/BUrlG, EU WTD) #2039)" subsection at the end of Step 2's clause walk, integrating at the mode's two existing output surfaces only:

   • the walked clause's neutral tags gain a statutory-context note (blockquote template, [Render in {language.output}: ...], fictional Acme Corp example): "Ontario's ESA sets 2 weeks of paid vacation (3 weeks after five years of service) as the floor; this clause states 10 days" — an arithmetic fact plus a statute fact, never a verdict; as_of staleness disclosure included;
   • the Questions for your lawyer list gains the generic floor question plus, where the row carries a void_doctrine and the clause is a termination provision, the Waksdale question: "Does the 'for cause' definition here match the ESA's wilful-misconduct standard? If not, does Waksdale void the entire termination provision, and what would common-law notice look like for me?"

The candidate-empowering Waksdale angle

The subsection states it explicitly and neutrally: under a whole-provision voiding doctrine, a defectively drafted termination clause is often better for the candidate than a valid one (voiding → common-law reasonable notice, typically far more than ESA minimums). That is exactly why it is a question worth taking to a lawyer — not a reason to reject the offer, and never a verdict this mode renders.

Describes-never-judges is preserved, not overridden

• Never assert voidness or violation (HARD RULE): employer size/payroll (Ontario severance), employee-category exemptions, greater-right-or-benefit analysis, choice-of-law — exactly the things a contract cannot self-certify. The mode never says the candidate's clause is void/illegal/unenforceable/in violation, and never says a doctrine "applies here". Floors, doctrines, dates, case lines = facts with citation; application = always a lawyer question.
• Floors-absent silence: no row / no floor for the clause family → no output, standard meta-statement boundary applies.
• Non-goal pinned in the mode text: no severance-amount calculations — common-law notice depends on Bardal-style factors no table can hold.
• No-online-research reaffirmed: table lookup is a local file read, not research; the memory guard gains only a narrow, table-backed carve-out, worded self-containedly inside the subsection.
• Not-legal-advice notes throughout; the existing offer-prep posture-freeze suite and hard-guard pins pass untouched.

Composition with #2029 (both merge orders)

#2029 (restrictive covenants, unmerged) also modifies modes/offer-prep.md. This PR is written to compose in either merge order, same convention as #2034's Step 5c/5d note:

• This PR does not touch feat(offer-prep): jurisdiction-aware restrictive-covenant notes — table + statutory context + lawyer questions #2029's three prose hunks (the "Never state law from memory" bullet, the Step 1 meta-statement boundary, the Step 4 lawyer-list paragraph) — this feature's carve-out and lawyer-list wiring are fully self-contained inside the new subsection.
• In test-all.mjs and templates/README.md the insertions are anchored at different points than feat(offer-prep): jurisdiction-aware restrictive-covenant notes — table + statutory context + lawyer questions #2029's, so those files merge cleanly in both orders.
• The one shared anchor is the subsection insertion point (both subsections land at the end of Step 2, before Step 3 — the only place they can go, and both are anchored to text that exists on current main, so each diff applies cleanly today). Whichever PR merges second takes a trivial, mechanical rebase there: keep both subsections, feat(offer-prep): jurisdiction-aware restrictive-covenant notes — statutory context + lawyer questions for non-compete clauses (describes-never-judges preserved) #2028's covenants subsection first, this one after it. No content changes in either resolution. Each PR's test pins pass on main + its own diff alone — neither assumes the other.

Seed discipline + freshness

Single narrow, verified seed per the umbrella #2026 contract (regulator-grade / law-firm-bulletin sources + as_of); broad coverage deliberately left to comment-listed candidate rows under the same discipline. Floors change (Ontario's vacation floor changed in 2018) — the table lives under the #2036 as_of freshness watch like every other member, and #2038's schema-agnostic discovery picks it up automatically once both land.

Housekeeping & tests

• SYSTEM_PATHS: covered by the existing templates/ directory prefix — node validate-system-paths-coverage.mjs passes ("OK: 752 tracked files covered"); no per-file entry needed.
• templates/README.md gains the table's row (the feat(oferta/apply): jurisdiction-prohibited content signal — table + Block G + apply-form warning #2020/feat(oferta): minimum-wage floor check — jurisdiction table + date-aware wage-floor signal #2027/feat(offer-prep): jurisdiction-aware restrictive-covenant notes — table + statutory context + lawyer questions #2029 precedent); no AGENTS.md row, matching the sibling tables.
• Four doc-structure pins added to test-all.mjs (1798 → 1802 passed, 0 failed on --quick, verified against this diff alone on current main — feat(offer-prep): jurisdiction-aware restrictive-covenant notes — table + statutory context + lawyer questions #2029's pins are not assumed):
  1. table parses + CA-ON seed complete (all four floors with the ESA figures, Waksdale + 2020 ONCA 391 + wilful misconduct + Dufault in void_doctrine, legal_basis, sources, quoted-string as_of);
  2. header rules (contribution rule, absent-floor-means-silence semantics, not-legal-advice);
  3. offer-prep subsection structure (table lookup, both touchpoints, floors-absent silence, never-assert hard rule, memory-guard carve-out, no-research reaffirmation, {language.output} rendering, wilful-misconduct question, Bardal no-calculations non-goal);
  4. phrasing scan scoped to blockquote lines only, and only for clause-directed verdict patterns (this/your clause|provision|term is void|illegal|unenforceable|invalid|below the floor|in violation) — so the doctrine description, which legitimately says the ENTIRE provision "is void" about Waksdale, can never false-positive (same scoping move as feat(oferta): pay-transparency disclosure signals — jurisdiction table + range-width cap (strong) + missing-range (corroborating-only) #2021/feat(oferta): minimum-wage floor check — jurisdiction table + date-aware wage-floor signal #2027/feat(offer-prep): jurisdiction-aware restrictive-covenant notes — table + statutory context + lawyer questions #2029).
• Consolidation offer (same as siblings): if a single consolidated templates/jurisdiction-*.yml is preferred over per-feature tables, happy to fold this one in — flagging per the umbrella's coordination note.

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Summary by CodeRabbit

• New Features

  • Added statutory context for vacation, termination notice, severance, and probation terms during offer preparation.
  • Added jurisdiction-based coverage flags, initially for Ontario, with source and verification-date requirements.
  • Added safeguards for missing data and prevention of legal conclusions, statutory figures, and unsupported calculations.

• Documentation

  • Documented the statutory reference template and flag-only data constraints.

• Tests

  • Added validation for dataset structure, offer-preparation integration, lawyer-directed questions, and legal-claim safeguards.