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posted by janrinok on Wednesday May 23 2018, @12:27AM   Printer-friendly
from the no-one-was-surprised dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 24 2018, @05:09PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 24 2018, @05:09PM (#683625)

    To be fair I've often wondered who YOU are khallow and what you really represent. You seem to have pulled back from most of the right wing craziness and focus solely on "yay capitalism" and other corporate apologetics. You routinely make errors so applying the microscope to originalowner here seems a little hypocritical.

    This all started from an idiot posting: "It's a free country until Leftism rears its head. Then we're all fucked." The ignorance in that statement is appalling, the veil of "freedom" in the US is more of an Iron Curtain. The reality is that very few get to join the capitalist ownership class, it is just a dream sold to the people to make them continue striving to achieve something which is outside their grasp. Like winning the lottery, freedom in the US requires extreme luck and more often than not well connected social groups.

    Pot meet kettle, "Marxist fashion" lol why not just wear a "McCarthy 2.0" shirt?

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday May 25 2018, @03:15AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday May 25 2018, @03:15AM (#683867) Journal

    To be fair I've often wondered who YOU are khallow and what you really represent. You seem to have pulled back from most of the right wing craziness and focus solely on "yay capitalism" and other corporate apologetics. You routinely make errors so applying the microscope to originalowner here seems a little hypocritical.

    I gave five links to examples of the problems I complained of (and I could have found more!), in addition to the original post I replied to. Can you do that?

    This all started from an idiot posting: "It's a free country until Leftism rears its head. Then we're all fucked." The ignorance in that statement is appalling, the veil of "freedom" in the US is more of an Iron Curtain. The reality is that very few get to join the capitalist ownership class, it is just a dream sold to the people to make them continue striving to achieve something which is outside their grasp. Like winning the lottery, freedom in the US requires extreme luck and more often than not well connected social groups.

    An obvious question here is how many people really want to join the "capitalist ownership class" in the first place? Sounds to me a bit like how many children want to be an Olympic-class athlete or an astronaut, but don't want to make the sacrifices that would be needed in order to achieve that goal.

    Like winning the lottery, freedom in the US requires extreme luck and more often than not well connected social groups.

    One wonders if you ever try. My suspicion is that you don't even understand what "luck" is.