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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."
I'm mostly against them, but might be okay if say the lawyer(s) were allowed a max percentage of the win, say 10% and everything else had to go directly to them below and not in the form of credits or coupons.
I hate fat people.
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.
The NLRB is given the power BY LAW to give employees rights. Sad that American courts seem to always side with the Big Corp, not the little guy who's been screwed over.
If you had a legitimate gripe with a company, wouldn't you individually try to get a settlement? Let's say you're 43 (like me) and work at some hipster SV web startup, and have a literal smoking-gun recording of your boss saying he doesn't like promoting old people? Or if you're a woman and some idiot salesman gets wasted at a party and assaults you in front of 50 people?
Class action settlements don't seem like the best way to get results. In consumer class actions, the defendant "admits no wrongdoing," pays an insignificant sum of money, the lawyers get almost all of it, and every consumer gets a check for 63 cents or a worthless coupon. That said, closing off another avenue of legal action is probably something companies have asked for and are paying the politicians to ensure it gets done.
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.
The most interesting part is there is nearly 50% of the country who will be glad they will now have less rights at work.
It's time to Unionzie! so the working man has a voice.
Contracts shouldn't be allowed to take away rights under the law.
As he said in the opinion, it's highly debatable of this is good policy, but it's quite clear what the law is. Congress makes law, not unelected, unaccountable judges.
Seems to be they sided with the Law and court Precedence.
"Writing for the majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch said that the 1925 Federal Arbitration Act trumps the National Labor Relations Act and that employees who sign employment agreements to arbitrate claims must do so on an individual basis — and may not band together to enforce claims of wage and hour violations.
"The policy may be debatable but the law is clear: Congress has instructed that arbitration agreements like those before us must be enforced as written," Gorsuch writes. "While Congress is of course always free to amend this judgment, we see nothing suggesting it did so in the NLRA — much less that it manifested a clear intention to displace the Arbitration Act. Because we can easily read Congress's statutes to work in harmony, that is where our duty lies."
NPR
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Some people think you can't even talk about the contract before accepting it, but before I accepted my current job I pointed out a clause in the contract that didn't work for me. I discussed it with my new employer and came up with wording which worked for both of us.
When I was hiring people, I sometimes proactively adjusted the contract to fit their needs. I knew one guy had a local company of his own in his country of origin and that might conflict with the non-compete clause in the standard contract. So I changed it so that clause did not apply to anything in his country. He wasn't allowed to compete with us while working for us, except he could do anything he wanted with customers in Costa Rica.
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.
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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.
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So what leverage do you think an uber drive has in adjusting that contract? Starbucks Barrista, Waitress at Chile's, You are lucky as you had a skill that was unique that made them willing to adjust. Not everyone is a snowflake.
The system has been in favor of employers for an extremely long time. Even our healthcare is a form of bondage. It doesnt matter how you come down on the healthcare debate, the fact that my healthcare is tied to my employer is a deliberate move to give employers more leverage to mistreat the employee. In any other healthcare system, whether it is socialized or otherwise, the ability to pick and choose your doctor is not tied to your employer. Once you have a decent healthcare plan and dependents, well, depending on it, you're a slave and you aren't even aware of it yet. Regardless of how bad your workplace is, or how mistreated or overworked, or underpaid you are, this one facet can often put you in a situation where you accept certain treatment, or mistreatment, or underpayment, etc. Because only here does telling someone to take this job and shove it, come with a crisis of healthcare to boot. In many cases, finding a new job comes with the uncertainty of new health insurance and its comparability to what you had before. Maybe the benefits are less, or maybe its a different carrier who allows/dissalows different medications and/or doctors. I am legally required to have car insurance in the US. At no point in time does leaving my job or having a job put me in a situation where my policy changes or I am without coverage. The same design could have easily been applied to healthcare. You pay the premiums, and your policy had nothing, whatsoever, to do with your employer.
But it wasnt. Instead its 'employer provided' which is horseshit because often a large chunk still comes out of your paycheck. And its leverage of the most unethical kind used psychologically against you to tolerate work conditions that would have never required a class-action lawsuit in the first place had this injustice not been served. Without the healthcare tied to employment, this class-action shit would be self correcting. They merely would be without a workforce a lot faster than before.
so you are saying he would legislate from the bench rather than follow the law? and you think that is the right answer here???
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
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."
If you work at Starbucks making coffee and your job sucks (redundancy alert), the solution is to finish high school so you can stop making coffee at Starbucks. "Starbucks barista" is never, ever going to be a great career. It doesn't matter how much you whine, petition, legislate, hope for change, or whatever, that job sucks and it always will. Trying to make that a great job is a losing battle. The way to win that game is to use your barista money to eat while you get your OMSCS, then you get a good job.
Technically it's not "forced arbitration" because one is not forced to sign the employment contract in a direct sense. However, during economic slumps or individual hard times, an individual doesn't have much practical choice: they are compelled to take any job they are offered, include those with arbitration clauses. A desperate person has no practical freedom of choice, and thus it's lopsided bargaining not much different than what the mob offers small shopkeepers: "an offer you can't refuse."
Table-ized A.I.
"Writing for the majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch said that the 1925 Federal Arbitration Act trumps the National Labor Relations Act and that employees who sign employment agreements to arbitrate claims must do so on an individual basis â" and may not band together to enforce claims of wage and hour violations.
Federal law shouldn't trump the Constitution.
In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
> 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.
> Neil Gorsuch: Fuck checks and balances. Not our job.
It's not his job to enforce your political agenda regardless of what the statute actually. Quite the opposite really.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The dems did the same thing to Bush allowing Obama to appoint many judges. Why should I care now that the shoe is on the other foot?
Legitimate citation, please.
I have no special gift, I am only passionately curious. --Albert Einstein
The poor and middle class aren't exempt from the court system and lawsuits. I see no reason why employers (the wealthy) should get any better treatment.
As long as the arbitration alternative exists at all, the voluntary agreement by both parties to use it must be binding.
That said, I do not understand, why it was created in the first place... Lawmakers have realized, the judicial system is too unusable and, instead of reforming it, created a new, parallel one...
This applies to the system of "small courts" too, BTW.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
That's a reasonable argument, you just have your facts backwards. In 1925, Congress passed the FAA (arbitration act). In 1935, they passed the NLRA (unions) act. In 2012, seventy-seven years later, the labor relations board decided they were going to start ignoring the Arbitration Act and pretending the NLRA, which didn't even mention arbitration (or class actions), somehow made the Arbitration Act vanish. That's a claim they never tried to make for seventy-seven years.
You make a good point that one should consider "if that's right, or even reasonable, why didn't anyone ever try saying that in the century in which the laws were passed". You're kinda backwards, though, because it's the board's new policy that is new, the board is making a claim that nobody thought even worth trying for 77 years.
As SCOTUS pointed out, Congress could repeal the Arbitration Act. They have not done so. Unlike Supreme Court justices, your house reps are up for re-election every two years, and they live right there in your city, so you can get in touch with them.
Thing is, there's a right team and a wrong team in 2018.
Democratic Party in 2018 effectively supports marijuana legalization (not jailing adults for what they put into their own bodies), worker rights (freedom from corporate abuse), reasonable restrictions on guns (part of the reason for trigger-happy US cops is that every idiot can get a gun), environmental regulations.
WTF does the GOP have that appeals to younger freedom-minded people in 2018?
You must be some kind of pinko. Real corporations know the trick is to get the lazy bastards to pay for the privilege of working!
Seems to be they sided with the Law...
They sided with one law over another. That's par for the course, and it's on Congress to fix. Which means it will never happen. Must say I'm not surprised to see Neil "Frozen Trucker" Gorsuch writing this one. He's the most pro-corporation, fuck-the-little-guy justice we have seen in a long time. "The law is clear," my ass. If it were, why was this a 5 to 4 decision?
Way to support the "forgotten man," Donald!
Property rights? LOL. Don't make me larf. "Law and order" conservatives in the US are more in favor of civil forfeiture (legalized robbery by cops) and "blight removal" than liberal Democrats.
Safe spaces? That's not a political agenda, that's a fringe concept -- it's not a platform of any mainstream candidate in the US.
Hate speech laws? They're a good thing within a limited context. Want to blather disproven drivel about IQ differences between races? Fine. But the moment you trot out a symbol of the Klan or call for the disenfranchisement of fellow citizens, you're inciting to a crime, if not to violence.
Free markets? They're not truly free -- they're heavily biased in favor of large corporations.
Does each worker who "wins" an employee class action suit get a voucher for a pencil sharpener at Staples?
Ad hominem means you lost the argument...
It's always been a partisan issue - but the various options for blocking partisan nominations made sure that only relatively moderate nominees would survive the partisan process. But when Obama got in, the Republicans started blocking every judicial nominee Obama sent up - until yes, the Democrats removed some of the blocking mechanisms. And yes, people said at the time "be careful what you ask for - you won't be in the majority forever". But seriously, what were they supposed to do, when the Republicans wouldn't allow any nominees through. And then came Merrick Garland, who would've almost certainly passed muster as a moderate SCOTUS nominee - except that the Republicans refused to even grant him a hearing, much less a vote that would've almost certainly approved him.
So yes, Democrats changed the rules - and then made up for lost time. But they didn't want to. I didn't say it wasn't 'smart' of Republicans to do this. Only that it threw out all notions of propriety and respect for the institution of the Senate. And they were only able to do it because their voters only care about winning in any way possible. And their donors, well...
Now, I do agree that Chuck Shumer makes my skin crawl every time he opens his mouth - and it will be a sad day if he's made majority leader. But, then again, the only person less palatable than Shumer is Mitch McConnel, so there.
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> most American voters are ignorant
So true, and so sad. Mostly the ones who vote every four years and don't have any idea who is running for Congress, or who their congressman is. All they know is a bumper sticker they saw related to the Presidential race. For many people, who have interests other than and policy and politics their understanding of what economic policy is limited to a dumb slogan.
> supporting the interests of the rich
Yeah, that kind of ignorance, actually falling for it when Hillary (who is quite wealthy) tells them that the only reason people would vote for candidates who follow what the Constitution actually says is to "support the rich".
There are a LOT more elections than the presidential election every four years. Even at the federal level alone, house members are up for election every two years. The general election for most house seats isn't normally close, one particular party has held that seat for 30 years because the party represents values that appeal to voters in that district. The real action is the primaries, where there may be only 12,000 votes cast, mostly by more informed people. A few hundred votes my swing the primary for a house seat. Some of these voters who come out for off-year primaries are very interested in policy. They are interested enough that they can intelligently discuss the pros and cons of different policy proposals, saying something like "the Democrat proposal may (or may not) boost the economy in the short term, at the cost of very significant debt dragging down the economy a few years later. The Republican proposal is more modest. It may not boost the economy as much in the short term, bit doesn't have the $400 billion price tag that the Democrat plan has."
if the other side has significantly more power than the other. This is also why you can't write a contract that sells yourself into slavery. Our laws have long since considered this and there's plenty of outs.
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I've yet to meet anyone who will agree that Trump's economic policies are a good thing when they're faced with the reality of them. He supports TPP, DACA, borrowed $1 trillion to finance tax cuts and 83% of that went to the top 1%. What I _have_ met is folks who like him because he "tells it like it is". I've found, to be blunt, this means he makes "elites" angry. If you dig further "elites" are never the billionaires that actually oppress them and fight to lower their wages and benefits. Elites are professors. Engineers. Scientists. To be blunt, they're folks who are just plain smarter than they are.
It can be annoying to be told what to do by somebody smarter. Especially when that person isn't much better off than you ("If your so smart why aren't you rich"). I'm not saying all Trump voters fall into this category, but I am saying he wouldn't be president without them.
One last thing. I don't want to abandon these people. I couldn't if I did. But I have no idea how to reach them. What do you do with people who's major complaint in life is they aren't very smart and are sick of smarter people telling them what to do?
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We need an open, publicly available, suitably licensed set of text that can be selected for inclusion into all contracts that explicitly disavows, rejects, and excludes any other clause that may allow for binding arbitration. Can some friendly lawyer or knowledgeable person rise to the task, please?
As you probably know, the "common" in "common law" refers to the courts trying to all follow the same rules as courts had followed over hundreds of years. If one English court in 1489 decided an issue one way, all future courts have that decision in common.
In the US, the common law has the lowest priority of our many sources of law. So yes, theoretically US courts could make new law, if the topic hadn't already been addressed by any of the following:
The US Constitution
Congress via statute
The Senate and President, via a treaty
A federal regulatory agency (administrative law)
The state Constitution
A state statute
A state regulatory agency
Any prior court, including English courts
There are literally millions of pages of law which take precedent over any new common law a modern court could otherwise create. 99.9999% of cases are covered by one of the above. Also, a decision to NOT regulate is a decision by any of the above authorities. So not only the millions of pages of law they have made, but also the million pages they explicitly decided not to make.
In this case, there is a very clear federal statute on the matter. Judges are not empowered to say "I disagree with Congress, so I'm replacing the statute with my own personal opinion instead". A court can treat a federal statue as void only if it contradicts the only higher priority
law - the Constitution. Even when two federal statutes seem to conflict the courts do not ignore one, they must apply them such that both have meaning.
in the 50s and 60s. Their reasoning was quite sound. The constitution has several clauses guaranteeing equal treatment under the law. It was shown that "Separate but equal" never could be. It created an inherent inferiority complex in children that often extended into adulthood (exactly as it was designed to do). Segregation was ruled fundamentally incompatible with the constitution and our framework of laws because it is.
That's the hard part about law. People are _always_ trying to wiggle out of it and do awful things. That's why we have judges in the first place.
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The Canadian Supreme Court ("SCC") seems to have avoided this, as all the parties have been careful to appoint really good jurists, on the grounds that they might be out of power at some point...
davecb@spamcop.net
You don't seem to be getting the point that the law that the judicial makes, "case law", is intertwined with the various steps you've listed, it does not simply reside at the bottom. The decision in this subject isn't a neutral opinion on the law, it is making law itself. By choosing between what takes priority between different conflicting laws and regulatory mechanisms, by saying that the arbitration clauses bind workers against banding together and running class actions SCOTUS has made law, and if you are involved in litigation covered by this you will feel the full force of that law.
Sure, the process of making law in the judicial branch is different than the statutory process of congress, but you must have missed the point of American history on the Marbury v. Madison. Because it wasn't just that the underlying action regarding payment commissions was "unconstitutional" from the standpoint of some independent observer from an inertial reference frame, the court got to decide on their say so that the law was unconstitutional and negate it as a consequence.
In other legal systems, like civil law practiced in many other countries such as in mainland Europe, the role of the judiciary in lawmaking is far more subservient to statutory lawmaking than in the common law system the US has. It's a bit of doublethink to believe that the US judiciary doesn't make law at the same time as believing that this SCOTUS decision will have a binding effect on the law going forward through precedent.
> You're confusing ignorance with disinterested.
Indeed not. Some people are interested in orbital mechanics, so they learn about orbital mechanics. Some people are interested in celebrity gossip, so they know about celebrity gossip. Some are disinterested in orbital mechanics, and therefore learn nothing about the topic. We learn about things that interest us, and don't sit studying things we have no interest in. Not having an interest in a topic goes hand and hand with being ignorant about it.
Most people have interests other than economics, so most don't know what the two main branches of economics are. This is answered within the first few pages of any economics textbook, but most people don't care to read economics textbooks - not even chapter 1. That's okay - everyone has their own interests and not everyone wants to be a public policy nerd.
Unfortunately, our system of government has the average voter choosing between proposed economic policies, because we don't want the king deciding for us. It hardly makes sense for economic policy to be decided by people who haven't even read page 1 of Economics 101, but that seems to be the best system we've come up with so far. It leaves the voters, who aren't even interested in studying policy, easily manipulated by politicians like Trump and Clinton, especially career politicians.
I accidentally stumbled upon something that MIGHT be a better system, perhaps. It might be worth some kind of small-scale trial. At one time, I only knew anything about one of our local council members. All the other names on the local ballot were a mystery to me. Two of my friends know the city government quite well, and these friends are intelligent and trustworthy people, so I asked my two friends their opinions of the candidates. My friends knew who at City Hall was super slimy and who was a moron. I wasn't asking them who will agree with my previously decided conclusions on specific policy issues, just which candidates are smart an honest people.
Similarly, in state and federal elections, friends sometimes end up asking me, because I'm the kind of nerd who knows who our state rep is and knows a bit about what he's been up to. Most of my friends wouldn't know the incumbent's name, much less have any idea if they are doing a good job. A couple times after I answer some of their questions friends have straight up asked me "so bottom line, who should I vote for for governor?" I didn't really want to answer that question for them, but I said "knowing you, you might want to look at these two candidates, especially Jones". The weird thing is I don't hesitate to ask my friend Dan what I should do about electrical things, because he's a knowledgeable electrician. I didn't hesitate to call my friend Charlie about how I should handle a plumbing issue. Why shouldn't I be helpful to them when they ask me who the better candidates are, because I'm more into policy and politics and economics than they are?
Instead of having politicians pandering to the lowest common denominator, selling slogans to people who don't know who the current vice president is, what if politicians had to convince the 10% of the population who has some interest and knowledge in public policy? What if you and nine of your buddies selected one of you, the most knowledgeable and trusted, to research the candidates and cast the votes for your group of ten? Instead of voting based on slogans, each person would be directly voting for their friend who is interested in this stuff and knows who their current US senators are, and what they've been up to. Each person would vote for someone they know personally and trust to do a little research and make a reasoned decision. It wouldn't be perfect, but it might be better than the current circus.
Gaggle of pill-popping sadistic bourgeoisie declare workers have no rights. Because fuck you, proles, that's why.
(And like all operations of the juridical oligarchy, there were no doubt promises of large lawful-bribes involved. But we're not supposed to talk about that.)
> subject isn't a neutral opinion on the law, it is making law itself. By choosing between what takes priority between different conflicting laws and regulatory mechanisms,
I listed the laws in order. Courts don't get to decide whether to follow an FDA regulation or the statute, the statute controls. This is because the FDA itself, and therefore all of its authority, are created by statute. The FDA cannot possibly have greater authority than statute because it got its power FROM statute.
Similarly, Congress gets its power from the Constitution.
An act of Congress cannot logically have more power than the Constitution, cannot be above the Constitution, because Congress's power comes FROM the Constitution. So no, courts don't and can't decide which to follow, the true law is the source law, in the order I listed them above.
Obviously there are times when reasonable people can disagree on whether some statute conflicts with the Constitution. Sometimes even people who have *read* the Constitution and the statute disagree. :)
(More often the disagreement is among people who have read neither, and confuse "I wish that" with Constitutionality). In those close calls, yes SCOTUS has the power to hold that some portion of a law conflicts with a a specific section of the Constitution, and Congress will have to fix the law to resolve the conflict.
An very recent example of thag was last week. Congress had passed a law saying states have to outlaw gambling. In effect, Congress had allowed gambling. The court saw that the Constitution says Congress can't order states to do things, so the court "noticed" that the law was unconstitutional. There really wasn't much decision for the court to make, it's written in black and white. The court also noticed that nothing in the Constitution prohibits Congress from regulating gambling directly, they just can't order the states to do it for them. Congress still has the power to make the law, they just need to word it differently in order to not conflict with the plain language of the Constitution.
I fear you are quite optimistic. The Democrat face of the Financialist Party is funded and controlled by the same interests that own the Republican face.
It's not Democrat partisans who favor legalizing weed. It's the entire population of people under 50.
I'm really really really not sure where you get the idea that Democrat partisans are pro-labor. Twenty years ago they tried hard to give that impression, while voting with the bosses every time. Now they don't even bother with pretending. Mainstream Democrat partisans are openly contemptuous of working people and the challenges we face.
I just don't see how disarming the masses is going to make a repressive police state any less repressive. In fact it seems certain to have the opposite effect. Law enforcers act like brutal thugs because badlaws allow them to do it, and the kangaroo courts pretty well actively encourage it.
Please don't misinterpret - I don't think the Republican dogs are a damned bit better. I like President Trump's personal style, and some aspects of his public policy. But alas I doubt he will leave much lasting positive change.
It isn't people getting out of jury duty that is the problem. The lawyers dismiss everyone with critical reasoning skills. They don't want the case tried on its merits because they have no control over those. So they select people they think they do have control over. My dad always said bringing a technical textbook to read at selection guaranteed him a dismissal in the first round.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
Now, your employer doesn't have to do anything but pay you what ever he wants when ever he wants to.
We don't need a class action suit for things that are illegal. Call your attorney general. She should know this, it's law 101. The only people to benefit from class action lawsuits are the lawyers. I'm part of these from time to time even though I knew nothing about it. I often get a useless coupon or something else that they make sure it's nearly impossible for me to use or benefit from. Lawyers on the other hand made a bundle on their work fair project.
RBG - Retire now. You're way past your best used by date. Especially since Nino (Scalia) isn't there to show you the error of your ways.