Microsoft Backs Bill To Give Harassment Cases Their Day in Court, Waives Its Own Arbitration Clauses (geekwire.com)

Microsoft is throwing its weight behind a Senate bill that aims to ensure victims of workplace sexual harassment can make their case in court. In doing so, Microsoft has become the first Fortune 100 company to back the bipartisan effort to ensure that companies aren't able to keep such allegations from becoming public. From a report: The tech giant says it's also waiving its own arbitration requirements for harassment claims in the "small segment" of Microsoft employment contracts that contain them. Microsoft says it has never enforced an arbitration requirement in a sexual harassment case. However, the requirement does exist in employment contracts with some Microsoft corporate vice presidents, legal and corporate affairs employees, and company founders who joined Microsoft through acquisitions.

Comments

Why was this allowed in the first place?

[lucasnate1]

Why are companies allowed to prevent their employees from going to the court? Corporate law trumps state law?

Re:Why was this allowed in the first place?

[Hal_Porter]

University Law trumped state law after the Dear Colleague letter, which obligated colleges to have their own Title IX hearings where guilt was decided on a 'preponderance of evidence' rather than 'beyond a reasonable doubt' if they wanted to continue to have Federal funding.

https://www2.ed.gov/print/abou...

As noted above, the Title IX regulation requires schools to provide equitable grievance procedures. As part of these procedures, schools generally conduct investigations and hearings to determine whether sexual harassment or violence occurred. In addressing complaints filed with OCR under Title IX, OCR reviews a school's procedures to determine whether the school is using a preponderance of the evidence standard to evaluate complaints. The Supreme Court has applied a preponderance of the evidence standard in civil litigation involving discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII), 42 U.S.C. SS 2000e et seq. Like Title IX,

Which led to cases like this

https://www.thefire.org/victor...

In finding Warner guilty, UND used the weak "preponderance of the evidence" standard (50.01% certainty) to determine guilt or innocence-the very same standard recently imposed upon every federally funded college in the country under an April 2011 regulation from the federal Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights.

UND's reliance on the "preponderance of the evidence" standard lowered the accuracy of the proceedings so much that the police and the university arrived at very different results. Using what the university later insisted was the very same evidence, UND's campus tribunal convicted Warner of sexual assault, while the Grand Forks Police Department determined that Warner's accuser had lied about what had happened.

In fact, on May 13, 2010, the Grand Forks County District Court formally charged Warner's accuser with "False information or report to law enforcement officers or security officials," a Class A misdemeanor, and issued a warrant for her arrest on May 17, 2010. To date, Warner's accuser has failed to appear to answer the charges against her.

"When you only have to be 50.01% sure about the evidence, it's easy to make a mistake or to let bias, conscious or otherwise, determine the outcome-especially in campus justice systems. Yet, the federal government is now mandating that this flaw be enshrined at practically every university in the country," said FIRE Senior Vice President Robert Shibley.

Warner first requested a rehearing on July 28, 2010, but UND refused to grant it. In the spring of 2011, Warner asked for FIRE's help. On May 11, 2011, FIRE wrote UND President Robert O. Kelley, pointing out the university's procedural errors and criticizing its failure to reconsider the case. On May 20, UND responded to FIRE, once again denying Warner's request for a rehearing. This is when UND revealed that it had used the very same evidence to find Caleb Warner guilty of sexual assault that the police and prosecutor had used to charge his accuser with lying to law enforcement.

On July 15, an opinion column in The Wall Street Journal by FIRE Chairman Harvey A. Silverglate launched FIRE's national press campaign to encourage UND to give Warner a fair rehearing. Two weeks later, UND Provost Paul LeBel finally invited Warner to appeal the finding against him. With the help of attorney Nathan Hansen, Warner submitted a new appeal on August 31.

Late last week, Warner received a ruling from LeBel announcing that "based on the specific fact of a law enforcement office filing an affadavit of belief that the complainant had provided false information to him" about the sexual assault accusation, a "continued fin

Re:Why was this allowed in the first place?

[Kohath]

No. Voluntary relationships tend to be contractual -- governed by a contract. A contract is a binding, enforceable agreement. Courts are a government service to the people, and one thing they do is enforce contracts if there's a dispute. Specific contractual actions are often beyond state law -- there's no law saying you have to perform work for Microsoft.

Arbitration agreements are an alternative to using courts. They came about because the rules for court procedures had become unduly expensive -- because court rules are controlled by lawyers, and lawyers have a financial incentive to make rules that lead to more billable hours for lawyers. Arbitration is agreed to by the parties entering into a contract containing an arbitration clause.

Arbitration is allowed by governments and courts because it resolves disputes without burdening government budgets and clogging schedules with entirely private disputes. Arbitration has court-like standards, so it more-or-less provides due process -- and if it didn't, litigants could go to court and get the contractual arbitration clause overruled.

There's various FUD about arbitration clauses -- because being mad and complaining about things you don't understand is an internet pastime for some reason -- and because lawyers want money and arbitration is a smaller payday for lawyers. But they're merely a mutually-agreed dispute resolution arrangement between the parties of a contract.

Hope that helps some people who genuinely want to understand.

Re:Why was this allowed in the first place?

[lucasnate1]

If I don't have a job, I will starve. On the other hand, most employers can easily replace most workers. I hardly see anything voluntary about this relationship. It is as voluntary as obeying a man who is pointing a gun at you.

Re:What is Microsoft's motive?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most likely Linux will not match Microsoft's actions, because the Linux community knows that historically it's always been very gender-biased and hostile towards women. If you pick any Linux usergroup at random anywhere in the world, odds are it's heavily skewed male. It's a very passive-agressive play on Microsoft's part to lock down the female share of the market which historically trends very heavily Apple.

What about rights for the innocent?

[mysidia]

And protection from frivolous/false claims.

How about prohibiting making the identity of the actual person you are accusing known in public, until a court adjudicates and confirms that accusation.

It's all too easy to throw around harmful false accusations. That's probably what the arbitration agreements are intended to do --- keep harmful false accusations from being public until arbitrated and reviewed. Forced arbitration IS a legal and reasonable way of settling claims without unnecessary harm to the innocent when the accusations turn out to be clearly false.