More Than Half of American Workers Can't Sue Their Employer (qz.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: In the past two years, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, and Oracle have faced various high-profile lawsuits related to their employment practices. And while those cases generated headlines, workers in almost every sector sue their bosses over emotional abuse, unpaid wages, and discrimination. The ability to sue over wrongful treatment at work is essential to the balance of bargaining power between employer and employee. Unfortunately, more than half of non-union, privately employed Americans -- some 60 million people -- have signed away this right. They are instead beholden to a process known as arbitration. Signing a mandatory arbitration agreement is theoretically voluntary, but refusing to do so can cost a candidate their job offer. Once signed, the agreement strips the employee of the right to take her employer to court for unfairly low pay, termination because of pregnancy, race-based discrimination, loss of paternity or maternity leave, and much more. According to a study published this week by Alexander Colvin of Cornell, more than half (54%) of private, non-unionized workplaces have mandatory arbitration procedures. For larger companies (over 1,000 workers), that jumps to 65%. By contrast, in 2003 Colvin found that just 14% of companies had arbitration agreements.

Comments

I don't think it matters what you sign

[mark-t]

Once signed, the agreement strips the employee of the right to take her employer to court for unfairly low pay, termination because of pregnancy, race-based discrimination, loss of paternity or maternity leave, and much more.

I was unaware that you could sign anything that would allow somebody else to break the law.

Don't bother going to court... just file a complaint with regional employment services and let them do all of that for you.

One of my kids did this once, when an employer he had at the time wasn't paying fair wages (he was effectively making people work for about half to three-quarters of what minimum wage was). It took my son a while to get up the courage to do this, and a fair amount of prodding from my wife and myself, because he was really afraid of losing his job, but after he did, things improved a lot where he worked within just a couple of months. Additionally, he received a whole ton of back pay that he was entitled to from the previous year and a half, going back to when he started working there. Also, it's my understanding that the employer did not know which employee had field the complaint with the government.