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The Center for American Progress reports
The Supreme Court held on [May 21] that employers can force their employees to sign away many of their rights to sue their employers. As a practical matter, Monday's decision in Epic Systems v. Lewis [PDF] will enable employers to engage in small-scale wage theft with impunity, so long as they spread the impact of this theft among many employees.
Neil Gorsuch, who occupies the seat that Senate Republicans held open for a year until Donald Trump could fill it, wrote the Court's 5-4 decision. The Court split along party lines.
Epic Systems involves three consolidated cases, each involving employment contracts cutting off employees' rights to sue their employer in a court of law. In at least one of these cases, the employees were required to sign away these rights as a condition of starting their job. In another, existing workers were told to sign away their rights if they wanted to keep working.
Each contract contained two provisions, a "forced arbitration" provision, which requires legal disputes between the employer and the employee to be resolved by a private arbitrator and not by a real court; and a provision prohibiting employees from bringing class actions against the employer.
Writing with his trademarked smugness, Gorsuch presents Epic Systems as a simple application of a legal text. "The parties before us contracted for arbitration", he writes. "They proceeded to specify the rules that would govern their arbitrations, indicating their intention to use individualized rather than class or collective action procedures. And this much the Arbitration Act seems to protect pretty absolutely."
It's the sort of statement someone might write if they'd never read the Federal Arbitration Act--the law at the heart of this case--and had only read the Supreme Court's decisions expanding that act's scope.
[...] Epic Systems means that employers who cheat a single employee out of a great deal of money will probably be held accountable for their actions--though it is worth noting that arbitrators are more likely to favor employers than courts of law, and that they typically award less money to employees when those employees do prevail. The biggest losers under Epic Systems, however, will be the victims of widespread, but small-scale, wage theft.
Via Common Dreams, Public Citizen says Congress Should Overturn Today's U.S. Supreme Court Decision Eroding Workers' Rights
Public Citizen is a national, nonprofit consumer advocacy organization founded in 1971 to represent consumer interests in Congress, the executive branch, and the courts.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday May 23 2018, @05:16AM (8 children)
Agree with the "necessary" but not with "sufficiency"
Counterexample: a slave can very well take responsibility for own choices, this doesn't make her/him free.
Freefolk is incompatible with "indentured service" as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 23 2018, @06:12AM (7 children)
Your first point is utterly irrelevant; you're countering someone else's argument, I guess, namely your own straw man.
Freefolk are perfectly compatible with indentured servitude; it's how many Europeans got to the North America, for instance.
I'm pretty sure you're confused about what "indentured servitude" is; it's not synonymous with slavery.
Also, you might be interested to know that the first legally recognized holder of slaves in what became the U.S. was a black African named "Anthony Johnson"; he was himself a slave in Angola (where rival tribes enslaved each other), was purchased by white people to be an indentured servant, and then became a free man when his contract expired. Next, he got his own indentured servants from Africa, whom he hoodwinked into legally agreeing to become full-fledged slaves (especially given that he culturally viewed slavery as an acceptable practice), which was upheld in court under the authoritarian legal system of the British empire.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday May 23 2018, @06:51AM (6 children)
The same relevance as your remark I replied to. It wasn't a argument running contrary to yours ... see, I agreed with responsibility as a necessity for being free.
Do you contest however the truthfulness of it?
Maybe it is for you, not for me.
I'm pretty happy to live in a country that guarantees I can go down only to a level of employee but allows me to chose who I'm agreeing to work for and the fact that I can leave that employer at anytime with a prenotice. It's about the level of choice that different law systems allow.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 23 2018, @04:03PM (5 children)
That's what law by contracts is all about: Your obligations can be different from my obligations.
Get it yet?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 23 2018, @07:04PM (4 children)
Everyone here gets it except for you. Your naivety is once again front-and-center. Reality does not conform to your idealism. Powerful groups create situations where people have little to no choice, and history shows that quite often the situations are created through violence. You like to ignore all of history with your idealistic notions, you never have anything to back up your ideas except continuously blathering the same "voluntary interactions get it yet?" garbage.
You don't get it. Get it yet?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 24 2018, @07:18AM (3 children)
So, as usual, you have no point, and have been hoist by your own petard.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 24 2018, @03:27PM
You sound like a crappily programmed not.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday May 25 2018, @03:24AM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 25 2018, @06:19PM
What do you really mean by "coerced"? Is the supposedly "coercive" party merely acting within the confines of all the other contracts that govern his interactions with you? In that case, it doesn't matter whether one party dislikes the interaction; it is by definition voluntary—the term "voluntary" does not mean "100% desired"; it means "according to well defined rules to which parties agreed in advance of interaction." It's not fun to lose a match of basketball, but it's a perfectly acceptable outcome for both the players and the thousands of observers.
The lack of a contract is actually a very dangerous state in which to exist; if one party is behaving in a way that is not well defined with respect to another party, then who knows what could happen! Warfare? Part of organizing society is making it clear not just to the interacting parties, but also to observers, what behavior between those parties is "voluntary" by definition. In this way, there emerges a very strong self-correcting enforcement mechanism regarding how that interaction proceeds, and the most robust, humane, innovative, freedom-protecting way in which to achieve such an outcome is law by contracts, not law by legislation.
Again, how is this "problem" better handled by a violently imposed monopoly like Uncle Sam? You'd have to be even more delusional to think He is the right way to go! By default, my "viewpoint" is superior, and so should at least be accepted as the foundation for further discussion on the organization of society.