Slashdot Mirror
Uber Drops Arbitration Requirement For Sexual Assault Victims (npr.org)
Previously, Uber required complaints to be resolved in mandatory arbitration -- out of court and behind closed doors. Today, the company announced it is "changing its policies to allow customers, employees and drivers who are sexually harassed or assaulted to take their complaints to court and to speak publicly about their experiences," reports NPR. From the report: Last month, Katherine and Lauren were among 14 female victims who sent an open letter to Uber's board, pointing to the company's own sexual harassment problems and the #MeToo movement. "Silencing our stories deprives customers and potential investors from the knowledge that our horrific experiences are part of a widespread problem at Uber," they wrote. The women's demand -- and Uber's response -- highlight the significance of mandatory arbitration agreements, which are increasingly common. The provisions are usually in the fine print -- and most people who sign the agreements don't know they have signed away their right to sue.
I'm thankful Uber, out of an abundance of caution concerning the potential PR blowup, revised their contracts. These arbitration agreements are going too far and it's time for some common sense regulations.
It should not be legal to sign away your right to sue simply for a common exchange of goods or services.
Did you know that there is a urologist in Austin TX named Dick Chopp?!! Isn’t that cray cray?!!
Can anyone explain how arbitration clauses work? How can a company limit an employee's rights to proceed legally against a company in case of criminal conduct?
That doesn't seem to make sense?
How in the hell is mandatory arbitration for customers legal? That makes zero sense. For any business.
Actually, it makes a lot of sense. Lawsuits in courts can be very expensive to litigate and damage awards are often very high. Arbitration generally results in much more reasonable judgements.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Arbitration generally results in much more reasonable judgements.
For the businesses that have contracts with the arbiters, of course. What's wrong with impartial judges?
they didn't do this out of the kindness of their heart. They're afraid they'll lose the ability to force their drivers and regular customers who get in wreaks into arbitration over this.
If you don't like arbitration contracts you'll need to change who gets elected. Kick the Republicans (who voted to allow companies to mandated it) and the corporate Dems like Pelosi & Schumer who did too. So far only the Bernie & Warren wing of the Democratic party has offered any serious opposition...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
What debate?
Unless you commit 100% you are a white male sexist rapist.
Or so you think there is another allowable position?
After all, trial by pitchfork wielding social media crowds is the new justice, isn't it? Facts and evidence are so last year!
How in the hell is mandatory arbitration for customers legal? That makes zero sense. For any business.
It's legal because you signed the contract. Arbitration has been around for a long time.
The original idea was to resolve disputes between businesses outside of the court system. It was a pretty good idea. As you know, lawyers will never settle a business dispute but rather will drag it on for years if they can. Lawyers get paid by the hour; they don't get paid for solving problems.
The idea is that you weren't forced to sign the contract. You could have walked away, but you agreed to be bound by it.
However, there are laws regulating arbitration and courts rule against bad contracts all the time.
The victims don't. What ever comes up in arbitration, no matter what uber says, should be revealed since it will harm Uber and possibly cripple them. Their victims lives are already ruined. Use the MAD option. In addition if Uber is hiding a crime the contract is invalid.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
First they raped the inmates, but I didn't care because I'm not an inmate. Then they raped the girls, but I didn't care because I'm not a girl...
Someone should file a suit and appeal it all the way to SCOTUS.
Such a law is clearly unconstitutional. See the Seventh Amendment.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
The arbitration clause wouldn't affect a criminal case.
A passenger who felt they were mistreated (rightly or wrongly) could sue Uber for not preventing it somehow, such as by having a more thorough background check of drivers or whatever.
I say "felt they were mistreated" because in many cases people have different viewpoints. There are instances where a clearly a crime was committed, obviously. This new policy also applies to alleged sexual harassment, though. That's a) not a crime (it is a reason to sue) and b) very, very subjective. The definition of sexual harassment is "unwelcome ...", so while one person might think they are both having fun laughing at a joke, the other person might internally feel the joke is unwelcome, and therefore potentially sexual harassment. The EOEC commission definition of sexual harassment also includes things like "offensive comments about women in general". I think most of us have seen a possibly innocent comment construed as "offensive about women in general", because someone heard something different than what the speaker intended or whatever. So there can be instances where everyone agrees no crime was committed, but one person feels a comment was offensive, and therefore sexual harassment.
Both of those can be true, though.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
That's a pretty extreme view, and kinda bizarre considering one of the worst offenders was an old black guy. His actions really hurt black people, the Cosby Show being such an important landmark for them...
And he was convicted by a jury.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
What we're thinking
So when someone tells you about being harassed or assulted, your reaction is more or less "fuck you"?
At least you're keeping it classy.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
It's a reaction to drama queens.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
changing its policies to allow customers, employees and drivers who are sexually harassed or assaulted
I'm sure this goes without saying, but Uber have no idea how laws work.
Well there's plenty of things that are clearly unconstitutional but SCOTUS pretends otherwise because too many people (well, people that matter) would be upset about it. See: Commerce clause allows police to arrest you for plant grown on own land for personal use legally under state law; a dog trained to please its master 'alerting' is a reasonable grounds for search; the entire war on drugs in general; civil asset forfeiture; permanently revoking from a free person a civil right granted in the Bill of Rights simply as a punishment; a border exception to the 4th that covers 2/3rds of all Americans; NSA spying on US citizens without a warrant in bulk; measuring if it's a 'speedy trial' in years; Sex Offender Registries are regulatory and not a punishment... need I go on?
They won't risk pissing off every big company in the country no matter how severe the contortions they have to make to lie about it being constitutional like they do with those other things.
Arbitrators are hired by the company. They're allegedly neutral, but do you honestly think one who rules against the company too often will continue to be called? As bad a regular courts are, mandatory arbitration isn't reasonable. I hope you were complaining about court costs for the customer and not the corporation, to which I'd say give them the option... allow the customer to choose arbitration if they so wish, but do not make it mandatory.
The judge in that case, who's married to vocal MeToo activist but thinks that's not a conflict, was incredibly biased and made rulings that are almost certainly going to get the case overturned on appeal. The parade of women not a party to the case, an "expert witness" telling the jury that inconsistencies and inaccuracies in a womans story are proof she's telling the truth (it's also proof if there are none of those), her waiting to bring the claim is proof she's telling the truth (doesn't matter if it's right away or decades later, it's always evidence of credibility), if she stays friends with him after it's proof, if she doesn't it's proof, and on and on about why everything that seems to impugn credibility actually bolsters it, all based on ridiculous "research" by gender studies professors with no grounding in objective fact. Admitting that as expert was a mockery of Daubert. At the peak of the MeToo movement the jury had 'ignore the facts, believe the victim' drilled into them with the full blessing of the judge; there's a reason the last jury deadlocked and this one didn't.
Look, I think Cosby was guilty, did similar to lots of other women, and is generally a bad person. But that doesn't justify denying him due process. And the precedents are going to be used in the future against people who are likely not guilty.
The notion that ordinary consumers are capable of informed consent when entering into services with huge corporations is laughable. Even if people read the huge contracts many wouldn't understand them.
The analog here is statutory rape. We don't accept consent from minors because they are not in a position to make a good decision in the first place. Mega-corps occupy a similar unbalanced place of power vs an individual.
Where have you been all this time?
There have been stories like "we had sex and he put finger into my mouth and I didn't like it". (one POC celebrity)
Or like "he asked for oral sex, I asked maybe later and then he kind of slightly nudged my head" - James Franco.
The pinnacle of sexual harassment, assault, rape and eating people alive (if we conflate definitions, let's do it grandly) for me was a Doctor, who "sexually harassed or assaulted or raped or eaten alive" by inviting her to become a "friend" on the facebook (something, that evil serial harasser/assaulter/rapist/cannibal did to all his patients).
The bloated approach to what does constitute sexual (insert something from unwanted comment to brutal murder) went so far, that when applied to men, figured that 6 million of american men are sexually assaulted/raped/murdered by women every year National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey 2010
But wait, it's not yet finished, these numbers are not scary enough some are working hard to get even more impressive figures.
Why do rapists have modpoints anyway? When you take sexual advantage of a captive audience, you're being rapey AF
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
> don't fucking hit on passengers in your cab unless they hit on you first
Well yeah.
I don't know about your friends, but most of my friends are really, really bad at knowing if someone is hitting on them. Some think people are when they aren't, most don't see it when someone is. That creates two opportunities for confusion with "don't hit on people in your cab unless they hit on you first". Was the driver hitting on the passenger? Maybe. Was the passenger flirting with the driver? Whichever he thinks, yes or no, there seems to be about a 50% chance he's wrong.
That doesn't even account for how people can get after a drink or two - exactly when people are most likely to call Uber. People sometimes sound awfully flirty after they've had a couple drinks. That doesn't mean they won't decide the next day that they didn't like the response. So the best general policy is probably "don't flirt at work". That doesn't mean you should be able to successfully sue someone because someone else responded positively to your flirty behavior.
> TFA says that it affects sexual assault cases.
As I recall, TFA links to another article, which in turn links to the actual policy statement. The actual policy covers sexual harassment, which unfortunately has a very subjective definition. Apparently it's very hard to define in a way that everyone is satisfied with.
> Assault is physical.
If there is actual touching, that's battery. Assault by itself is an attempt . That's why you typically only hear battery mentioned as "assault and battery" - because if they DID touch, then they first attempted to touch. So you pretty much can't have battery by itself without assault. You hear assault mentioned separately because someone can make an attempt without actually doing it. A problem with assault is one must deduce what was in the person's mind, what they were trying to do. Sometimes that's obvious, sometimes it's not.
The above are the classical definitions of just "assault" and "battery", without adding "sexual". Battery is touch that intentionally or knowingly causes injury, assault is an attempt to do so.
Once you get into "sexual assault", the terms used depend on the state. There is no such crime as "sexual assault" in California. It's sexual battery. Sexual assault *would* mean "tried to touch my boobs", but that's not in California law. California (and some other states) have a crime of "sexual battery" - non-consensual touching of sexual body parts for sexual pleasure. Texas is an example of a state which uses the term "sexual assault" for what would more accurately be called sexual battery, or rape.
Nonsense. Most countries have some form of arbitration outside the regular court system. For instance, the Sharia courts operating in England do so under the guise of Arbitration.
Basically. It's a reaction cultivated by people like you who made a big deal about every little thing. I mean, christ, the girl who wore a chinese styled dress to prom and people like you were screaming "cultural appropriation" and how awful of a person she was and how offensive it was, and then the chinese came back with "you may call it cultural appropriation, but we call it cultural appreciation". And I say people like you not based on this one post, but off of hundreds of posts I've seen you make.
Basically, when you make a hobby out of getting offended on other peoples behaves, regardless of whether they actually were offended themselves, those of us who aren't fanatics will become deaf to claims of harassment and abuse. Boy who cried wolf and all that.
I see this all over the place and it is royally fucked up. If I say "John stole my car" that does not make me a victim of theft. It makes me an accuser. and it does not make John a thief, it makes him an alleged thief.
Imagine I demand that white people accusing black people of crimes should be "just believed" and call any white accuser a victim. Would that not be vile and racist? So how is "listen and believe" not vile and sexist? Those accusing people of sexual crimes (male or female, because there are female perpetrators and female false accusers in the world) are not victims until the crime is proven.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
It's a reaction to drama queens.
Definition of drama queen: anyone who doesn't just shut up and toe the line.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The easiest way to tell if a rule/law/ordinance/convention is reasonable, is to consider what would happen if everyone complied with it. Would the world be a better or worse place? In the case of "User Agreements", if everyone read them in their entirety, the economy would grind to a halt overnight as person after person worked their way through one 47-page hyperlinked document after another. Not to mention all of the indirect documents they would supposedly need to read ... and they would need to "check back and re-read the policy often" ... you know, in case something had changed.
It's safe to say that we'd be in extreme trouble should these documents every get read, and in fact, the companies that publish them absolutely depend on people NOT reading them, for if people did, that company would go bankrupt in very short order.
That it's completely unreasonable and impractical to read said terms, not to mention, the obligation to keep reading every TOS you've encountered over and over, is not even a controversial statement.
Another thing that completely obliterates all notions of good-faith, is that fact that the company can tell how long someone was on the "Contract" page before clicking through. They know very, very well that the use did not read the arbitration clause in 3 seconds, and knowing that, they are aware that there was no informed consent. She knows that a practical reality of living in modern society necessititates bypassing pages and pages of legalize, and our very economy depends on her not reading it.
What is the pinnacle of sadness and shame for the USA, is that a private company has to "allow" a person to exercise their legal rights on the basis that they user signed away those rights by clicking through a long document they viewed in 3 seconds. Prenups are invalidated when one spouse has legal representation and the other doesn't, but a woman can sign away her ability to go to court for sexual assault? And we allow it? We truly are the worst generations of Americans, and no amount of excuses, justifications, or snarky comebacks will change that.
If you steal a $1 pack of gum from a store, it's a criminal matter. If a company rips off millions of customers and/or negligently subjects them to sexual assault, it's a civil matter.
I shouldn't be the only one hanging my head in shame to have allowed this to hapoh look the football game's on! Go Foreskins!
shit, paragraph breaks
It is no longer possible to enforce a punitive NDA or an arbitration that restricts disclosure of sexual harassment or abuse. The legal and PR consequences will prove disastrous.