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

Yup

[Captain Splendid]

Another US-invented oxymoron: "Right To Work" laws are anything but. At least all that FREEDOM! balances it out though, no?

Re:Yup

[operagost]

"Right to Work" is not some blanket designation for "bad workplace policies that I want government to abolish". All "Right to Work" stands for is preventing closed shops... that is, a workplace where one MUST join a union to be employed. Now, mind you, OSTENSIBLY a union should protect you from policies such as third party arbitration through a CBA, but that's not guaranteed. So lumping an arbitration agreement under "Right to Work" is simply incorrect.

Re:Yup

[Anonymous Coward]

When I was a teenager, I worked for a grocery store.

I had to pay a $50 initiation due to the union just to work there. Then I had to pay around 5% of my wages as ongoing dues to the union as well. My first week's paycheck was a negative number. The grocery store was used to this, and took the rest of the first week's dues out of my second week paycheck, which also had a chunk of dues taken from it and was a pittance. I made $0.10 over minimum wage, so it's not like this was a "high-paying union job" or something. Across town, the non-union grocery store paid only minimum wage.

Oh, but the union would give me back $25 of those dues if I attended a union meeting within my first month! So I did. They never gave me my money back. Now, the job was OK, but the union was basically useless. As a "front-end clerk" (read: grocery bagger), I didn't get raises on the schedule that literally all other employees got. I also didn't get the same level of health insurance. Or any 401k matching, life insurance discounts, etc. Oh, but I paid the same percentage of my paycheck in dues.

I worked there through college, eventually getting raises up to $10/hr. as a checkout clerk. As a checkout clerk, I got all of the "stuff" that the union promised. The baggers still got screwed over. And every union negotiation made it worse on them. And from what I understand, that's all gone downhill for all of the floor staff in the years since I quit working there.

This is why Right To Work passed so many states' legislatures. Nobody thinks these asshats (UFCW, I'm looking at you) deserve a free-ride anymore. They should have to fight to convince every single member that they're necessary. They should have to act in their members' best interests instead of simply in the interests of the union bosses. Just as an example: A few years after I left that job, the local UFCW boss was convicted of embezzling from the union. A couple of his deputies went down with him, but testified against him and didn't get prison time. The whole top management layer of the union was corrupt. (Shocker, I know.)

Now, they can't do that anymore. If I want to work at that grocery store, I have the option of becoming a UFCW member or not. They can't deny me employment because of my refusal to join the union. And everyone with half a brain should refuse to join that particular union. They're worse than useless.

Re:Yup

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm doing fantastic under those laws. I work hard and outcompete all of my colleagues. So long as I keep doing that and they don't cough up enough to hire someone even better, I'll be collecting paychecks. They've desisted from hiring someone better for less: it's more expensive to search for them than to just pay me.

Re:Yup

[liquid_schwartz]

My observation in life is that things work best when no one side holds too much power. Human nature to abuse power is simply too strong and the only way to subdue that is to not allow any one side of *any* issue to get too much say. Give management too much power and workers will be abused. Give unions too much power and the company will be driven out of business.

Re:Yup

[KozmoStevnNaut]

Translated: "I work myself to the bone, in the vague hope that my employer won't randomly decide to replace me, for no discernible reason".

Wouldn't you rather be able to relax and enjoy life?

This should not be legal.

[Anonymous Coward]

You should never be able to sign away your rights. This is a terrible precedent. To me, that's part of the definition of what a right is. Something that is by definition yours and cannot be taken away. Inviolable. I just don't understand how you can be made to sign a piece of paper that takes away some of the things that are the absolute bedrock of our country.

Arbitration is a scourge

[JohnFen]

Arbitration is a scourge designed to deny you your legal rights. It only works properly when there isn't already a power imbalance.

Re:Arbitration is a scourge

[Anonymous Coward]

It's privatisation of the judiciary. Even Milton Friedman explicitly singled out the courts as one area he would NOT privatise, but of course the business bullshit brigade just blew-hard until they got that too.

The blame lies with a public which allows such intellectually vapid arguments to win out over common sense, civic values, and ultimately the rule of law. If people called out bullshit for what it is, we wouldn't be living today in such a fucked up shell of our former societies and economies.

Stop Allowing This

[Anonymous Coward]

The U.S. really needs a law that makes it illegal to restrict avenues of legal recourse within any contract (whether it be explicit or implicit such as a TOS). It should be illegal to have "can't sue us no matter what!" clauses. It's an abuse that is way out of hand. You can't own a house, have a job, buy food, buy a car or pretty much any other necessity without dealing with some scummy company that wants you to sign away your legal rights to do business with them.

Not exactly

[110010001000]

You can still sue your employer in public courts even if you signed a arbitration agreement under certain cases. Clickbait.

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.

You always have a choice

[rsilvergun]

I keep hearing that phrase and it infuriates me. If your employer comes to you with one of these contracts you sign it. And it's been upheld by law since congress passed the Mandatory Arbitration Law this last year (and it was upheld by the Supreme Court). Sure, I can get another job, and likely get another one of these contracts put in my face.

And no, I can't just start my own business. If you don't have capital you can't do that. Most people need money coming in. Heck, 60-80% of us live paycheck to paycheck (depending on how you run the numbers).

And that's before we talk about all decisions made for you. Like our car based transportation system that was built in the 40s, 50 & 60s. Or our healthcare system that was built during WWII. Or if you're under 30 our college system. Or hell your parents.

Ever year I get fewer and fewer choices and get boxed in again and again. Meanwhile the number of times somebody says that stupid phrase goes up. Go figure.

Re:You always have a choice

[bluefoxlucid]

I work from free-market economics a lot, because the market is basically a machine that solves big, complex problems. A lot of people don't like the "invisible hand" argument because a lot of people don't understand how markets work.

This is a good example of not understanding how markets work.

Markets work when there is competition. Competition requires consumers to have options, to have a choice. What we have here is called a false choice: you can choose between the options given, but one of those choices will get you a whoopin'. If the choice is between a less-than-optimal outcome and one which is outright harmful to yourself, you don't have a choice; you have coercion.

When competitors are so inconvenient that a consumer experiences harm selecting from them, competition doesn't strictly exist. Fringe ISPs, for example: if all of the useful, high-capacity ISPs throttle things like Netflix unless Netflix pays a lot of money, Netflix's prices go up and they have a hard time staying in business; meanwhile the ISPs who don't manage to do that are often the ones with service incapable of providing what the user wants, or even incapable of streaming Netflix. Thus, without Net Neutrality, your big ISPs have the power to make Netflix not work or to impact its pricing, fragment its user base, and so forth; and the remaining small hold-outs don't supply a robust consumer market, and may not even be able to provide service adequate for users to stream Netflix. False choice, lack of competition.

The same is true of this runaway arbitration. You can't choose between arbitration and no arbitration, because you're choosing between finding a job and struggling to find a job. With so many employers putting this in their contracts, there's not really a competitive job market offering candidates a way to simply go to employers who provide an acceptable contract; even if there were, once those employers got enough employees to mete the demands of their market, they're no longer hiring, and the rest of the workforce is stuck with either arbitration clauses or unemployment. Again: false choice.

Clearly, the invisible hand of the market is stealing from the cookie jar here, and needs to be whacked with a ruler a few times. We need legal rules preventing this sort of abuse. Markets do many wonderful things and solve many problems; they are, however, subject to the laws of economics, and the basis of those laws is that people economize and thus that those with the power and means to reduce their risks (and thus costs) will use them. Employers will become abusive, and need to be set into their place. This is necessary for our market to stay healthy and continue to do the things we want the invisible hand of the market to do--the things command economy socialists consistently fail to pull off when we put them in charge of a nation.

Laissez-faire capitalists went out of style decades ago because they figured out the invisible hand is self-serving and put the damned thing on a leash.

Re:You always have a choice

[Calydor]

Where I'm from, we have a saying about this 'You always have a choice' nonsense. 'Plague or cholera'. Doesn't matter what you choose, you're fucked.

It's a corporatist system

[HBI]

There's another name for a government that enforces a corporatist system. Take a guess what it is? It's real popular on the streets nowadays.

Sigh.

[ledow]

Repeat after me:

You can't sign away a right.

If you can, it was never a right.

In any civilised country, this stuff just renders the clause null and void if ever challenged, and potentially large tracts of surrounding legalese too.

"This does not affect your statutory rights" is an age-old and totally redundant piece of legalese. Because NOTHING affects your statutory rights, whether they say it or not.

If the US are so daft as to allow "rights" to be signed away, they deserve everything they get from not challenging it from day one.

P.S. Extrapolate the consequences. If you can sign away a right, you can sign away "the right to remain silent". Not just be asked to talk, but actually REMOVE THE ABILITY for you to remain silent. The right to free speech. The right to a private life.

If you can sign away a right, any right, that right doesn't exist as a right, and likely none of the other things called that do either.

Re:Sigh.

[tomhath]

You can't sign away a right.

If you can, it was never a right.

What is the basis of that statement (other than your own personal belief that is has to be true)? Two parties can sign a contract agreeing how to resolve differences, it happens all the time.

Re:News or union sponsored propaganda?

[alexo]

The fact that union shops screw you in one way has no bearing on the finding that non-union workplaces screw you in another way.

Mandatory Arbitration Clauses are...

[icejai]

... prohibited in certain provinces in Canada.

This has been challenged in Canadian court several times. I remember reading a judgement handed down by a judge, where he stated (paraphrased loosely) that mandatory arbitration "was against the public good"... or something like that... and allowed class action.

People can't just sign away their rights.

And corporations can't privatize the judicial system.

It's as simple as that really.

We just did the exact opposite

[rsilvergun]

we enshrined them in laws. Our Congress passed a law making Mandatory Arbitration legally binding and our Supreme Court upheld it.

Don't get too comfy over there though. You're ruling class is watching us and taking notes.

Right to Work and Arbitration

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny thing about Right-to-Work. It is a term that was market-tested to be most acceptable. What it actually does is compel unions to represent workers who are not members and pay no dues. I like to think of it as slavery.

One major role of unions is to negotiate contracts on behalf of workers. When a majority of workers decide that they no longer want to pay dues, per Right-to-Work, the union dissolves. Without a party to negotiate with, management can simply include anything that they want in an offer of employment. That includes an arbitration clause.

One employer offered me a job with terms stating that they could subject my credit to unlimited checks and perform background checks in an unlimited fashion. I walked, but some suckers must have signed.