Slashdot Mirror
Supreme Court Upholds Workplace Arbitration Contracts Barring Class Actions (nytimes.com)
The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that companies can use arbitration clauses in employment contracts to prohibit workers from banding together to take legal action over workplace issues. From a report: The vote was 5 to 4, with the court's more conservative justices in the majority. The court's decision could affect some 25 million employment contracts. Writing for the majority, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch said the court's conclusion was dictated by a federal law favoring arbitration and the court's precedents. If workers were allowed to band together to press their claims, he wrote, "the virtues Congress originally saw in arbitration, its speed and simplicity and inexpensiveness, would be shorn away and arbitration would wind up looking like the litigation it was meant to displace." Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg read her dissent from the bench, a sign of profound disagreement. In her written dissent, she called the majority opinion "egregiously wrong." In her oral statement, she said the upshot of the decision "will be huge under-enforcement of federal and state statutes designed to advance the well being of vulnerable workers."
One more reason to love unions. If you can't sue 'em, band together and strike, forcing your PoS employer to either play ball or go bankrupt. Paralysis can be a powerful weapon.
In consumer class-actions, the loss to each consumer is often very small ... i.e. a $100 electronic device was defective.
In cases against employers where losses from loss of income or health issues can be in the $10,000+ range, plaintiffs would get much more, even if lawyers would also profit.
There's also the angle that the companies should be punished for their bad behavior by paying.
If you don't like the law, then pass different legislation. The court properly upheld the law as passed by congress. To rule otherwise would make the Judaical branch into an elite legislature that wasn't elected and has no check on its power.
Gorsuch is laying out exactly what you would hope SCOTUS would do: That is, interpret the current law with as much accuracy and honesty as possible, and put the onus back on Congress to alter the law if it is bad. Ginsberg is firmly in the legislate-from-the-bench category and it is dangerous and disturbing to see.
Work makes free, after all, and the US is all about freedom :)
Americans. Temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Look it up.
Sad times when the sheep sympathize more with the wolves than with other sheep.
Contracts shouldn't be allowed to take away rights under the law.
Wow, just....wow.
Do you really believe this?
I mean, I've had a number of jobs over my lifetime. And in none of them, was a subjected to anything remotely looking to be like a "labor camp".
I started out washing dishes in restaurants, bus boy, waiting tables, bartending....later retail sales (mostly clothes and shoes, etc).
There was nothing oppressive about those jobs. They paid according to what the job was, and well....ALL you had to do, was show up on time, actually do your job...and you got paid.
Having to follow the employers rules, often that had to do with appearance, and to show up on time, in good mind and actually work.
Are work concepts that once were common place now what makes one feel they are in a labor camp??
Just because the employer doesn't bend over backwards to cater to your needs and feelings, and need to sleep in?
And, in a labor camp, you don't get a choice....I"ve yet to see any area of work in the US where they hold a gun to your head, and force you to stay as an employee against your will and not allowing you to quit and seek out alternative employment.
Or, have I missed something these past few decades?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
It's a corporate kleptocracy. Run by and for the benefit of corporations. They buy politicians and judges to get the laws they want.
Also known as Fascism.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Ummm. American courts presided over by Republican appointees, you mean. As has been pointed out before, Trump may be putting on a big freak show out front, but the Congress is remaking the courts quite 'effectively' behind the scenes. Somehow they managed to obstruct Obama's nominees so effectively that not only did they leave a huge backlog of slots to fill, they so frustrated the Democrats that the Dems knocked down some of the means of obstruction they could've used to stop it. Of course, the Republicans have knocked down the rest of those means since they took over, so it might not have helped for the Democrats to have held out on this or that 'nuclear option'.
Amazing what you can get done when you have no respect for norms - or Democracy itself, and an effective and well-funded propaganda engine covering your tracks.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
is constitutional. Forced arbitration is a clear violation of the due process clause. It sets up Kangaroo courts run by our corporate masters. A completely separate "justice" system by the mega-corp and for the mega-corp.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Class actions solve the problem of having a large number of people with a small dollar issue. Individually, they are unable to take on a well funded company. Collectively, they can.
Many people complain that the "lawyers get too much money". That's true on both sides of the dispute. The final payout to plaintiffs may be small individually but the company does take a hit which hopefully discourages bad behavior. That's why companies are so eager to ban class action suits.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Work makes free, after all, and the US is all about freedom :)
Arbeit macht frei
I prefer to use the original German phrase.
No, they should be subject to the discretion of the courts, and ideally of a jury of working people with some level of empathy. Not to some so-called impartial arbitrator chosen by the employer itself. The latter is nothing but a "kangaroo court."
Venezuela is just authoritarianism calling itself socialism. It's a stupid strawman to bring to an argument.
I raise you France, Germany, Switzerland, Australia, Canada, Sweden as countries that have stronger worker protections than the US, but aren't starving to death either.
The problem is the arbiters are employed by the corporation. Do you really think they're going to be impartial and make any significant rulings against the large company that is brining them the business? If they do the company will select a new company to start handling their arbitration claims.
If you want to make it at least somewhat fair, then you'll have to require the companies to let the employee pick the arbiter and not from a curated list.
Arbitration is for when you do have a contract, that someone feels the other violated. Employment contracts should be subject to binding arbitration.
"Arbitration" is what the courts are for. Professional arbitrators know damn well who is paying their hourly rates and who to please in their judgements to get repeat business. It is an inherent conflict of interest which undermines the rule of law to outsource our civil court system to a bunch of lawyers on the take from big business.
Judges are paid by the public and serve the public interests. Arbitration should only be enforced by the courts if both parties continue to be in agreement throughout the arbitration and even after. There should be no such thing as "binding" arbitration that supersedes people's right to go to a civil court to seek an equitable resolution of a contract dispute.
That is a slippery slope if we can bargain away our rights under the law for a few bucks under some fine print nobody reads.
Have you ever been involved in a jury selection process? I have. The only people left are the ones with no emotions and no coherent thoughts or ideas of their own. They also tend to have a below average IQ.
I've served on a jury and that is an absolute load of crap. You may have some juries that statistically fall out that way, but by and large they are composed of normal, working people take from the local population (usually on the basis of voter records or, in some jurisdictions, drivers license or other domicile info). There are those who lie to get out of jury duty, but given that you want an honest jury, they are inadvertently helping to self-select some rather loathsome people (themselves) out of the jury pool.
As for arbitration, I would trust the worst jury in the world over private arbitration where the offending party selects, and pays, the arbiter, which is generally how arbitration in the United States "works."
> Hey, here's a new concept for you. Your experiences are not that same as everyone else's.
Except you have ZERO experience. You just blindly swallow propaganda and media narrative. Some of us grew up working class. We have plenty of experience to draw from. We don't have to speculate about this stuff.
Alternatively, this is the information age.
If you want to spin a narrative, you can actually back up your hysterical nonsense with proof. You don't have to make up fantasies supported by absolutely nothing.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
> Yeah, and activists knew full well that this was case that would have gone the other way if the seat had not been stolen for Gorsuch.
That's a pretty sad statement about liberal judges if you think that NONE of them can interpret the law without inserting their own personal partisan agenda into it.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.