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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.
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.
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.
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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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.
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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