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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."
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.
Would you be against them if workers had a genuine complaint and their employer generally treated them like sub-humans? Say they were exposed to toxic chemicals without their employer telling them or giving them proper protection, and are now paying through the nose to deal with health problems 20-30 years later.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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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.
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.
That's an argument for making it more difficult to get out of jury duty. Also, I know quite a few people who got called for jury duty in NYC and don't fit your description. The city made it much more difficult to get out of jury duty sometime in the 90s, and the system is apparently working.
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.
Go shill somewhere else. Your reference was what year? 1960 - 1970 range? it probably payed something liveable abck then.
minimum wage is not a living wage today, even if it was full-time work, which it almost-never is.
just show up and work? pfft --- employers are demanding their minimum wage employees not have a set scehdule -- have weird ever-changing shifts, not know their schedule until the night or just hours before. AND you are required to call in. they dont call you...... so you have no safety in scheduling daycare or even relaxing and using your non-work-time for recreation, let alone having a second job.
Their oppressive in that they pay minimally while impeding the ability to even work a second job. they impede to day to day life.
These employers make HUGE NET PROFITS, while keeping employees on minimum wage and thr STATE has to come in and pay food stamps.
of course, one could not work mimum wage --- and be kicked to the street, where almost everything is illegal. Loitering, park bench sleeping, or just sleping in a bush....So being a law-breaker one would then be placed in jail/prison where one is not rehabilitated, but punnished, and maybe also forced to also work for a PUBLIC/PRIVATE for-profit company.... for maybe 20 cents an hour.
I don't know about you, but i also feel if people who work in toxic environments, it should be the responsibility of the employer to contain that toxin. So the workers don't bring home mesothelioma to their children who hug their pan-legs, or the community at large. But the supreme court disagrees with that as well. disgusting.
but oh what country did you say you lived in? it doesn't sound like the usa i know and grew up in.
These jobs you're describing are all hourly positions. Legally your employer has to offer you breaks, and not just for meals. Plus a whole bunch of other stuff. It's all pretty straightforward, work and get paid. But not paid very much. You'll be kept part-time, and clear perhaps $10k-$20k a year. Maybe less. Maybe a lot less.
You'll need to hold down 2 or 3 jobs, at a minimum, to keep body & soul together. Oh, and some of those hourly jobs, you're on call. No pay unless they call you in. But if you can't make it when they call, you'll make their shit list & they'll never call again. Unless you're a really attractive woman and the boss wants to hit on you.
Move up a notch, say to the programming world, and now you're salaried. Your employer can demand 60/80/100+ hours a week from you with no additional pay. They can fire you at any time. I had a boss that would schedule impromptu meetings at 8 o'clock at night, knowing that if I missed my bus I'd have to work several more hours before the next bus came. (Or wait outside in a dangerous neighborhood in sub-zero temperatures.) I've had bosses yelling in my face, "What do you mean you're going home. It's only 9pm. Your cat won't starve if you don't feed it for one night." (No, I'm not working there anymore. But it sure was difficult interviewing around while working so much overtime!)
Now add in the part where you have to sign a contract that not only signs over anything you do or create while employed, but also dictates where you can work and who you can talk to for 5 years or more after leaving said employment. And some of those contracts, they were pretty generous. I saw one that ruled out pretty much any commercial software development anywhere in the world for 5 years after leaving that job.
Yeah, it's pretty bad out there. But if you don't sign, you don't work. It seems like every employer has a contract like that. Eventually you get hungry.
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.
Being poor is effectively illegal. If you don't have money, you wind up having to do illegal things to exist. Some of these things are only mildly illegal, but they can lead in various ways to loss of possessions. Penalties for a lot of typical homeless behavior include fines... against people who don't have money. If you get into enough of this trouble long enough, they'll lock you up for long intervals — either in a prison rape factory, or an insanity-inducing facility for the criminally insane.
It's better than a literal labor camp, but there's definitely a similar mechanism at work. As it turns out, people work harder if they think they're getting a good deal. Most people are pretty easy to fool, so you fool 'em. The remainder you either lock up as a warning to others, or scare into working (by locking up that middle group.) Of course, it's a lot more complicated than that; there are various shades of tricked and scared. Foundation of society, anxiety, suppress it if you can.
Or, have I missed something these past few decades?
If you have a roof over your head and know where your next paycheck is coming from, you are one of the 8%... worldwide. The rates are much better here; The current U-6 unemployment rate is 7.8%, but even that fails to account for at least 7.5 additional million workers who are unemployed. The U-2 is based on a claim of 6,346,000 unemployed workers, and it is little more than half of the U-6; This puts the total actual number of unemployed at somewhere in the vicinity of twenty million, with a rate of around 10 or 11 percent.
So uh, congrats on being part of the 90%, I guess. But that percentage is headed downwards. Young people are choosing to stay in school longer; I know for my part, when I did that it was because I didn't know what else I was going to do with myself, and there was grant and loan money available to me as a student. Others are no doubt working on more advanced degrees, in the hope that will differentiate them from other applicants, and it will; but in this economy, most of them are taking on massive student loan debt for that purpose which may never pay off.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"