Thread by @greenhousenyt

Many workers have little idea how disastrous the Supreme Court's 5-4 Epic Systems decision was for vindicating workers' rights—The ruling lets employers prohibit workers from filing class actions on wage theft, sex bias, etc & lets them require arbitration rewire.news/article/2018/0…

Trump says he is a champion of workers, but his first appointee to the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch, provided the pivotal deciding vote in Epic Systems and wrote the majority opinion in that hugely anti-worker decision. thinkprogress.org/neil-gorsuch-t…

For workers, individual arbitration is problematic for many reasons. First, employees win far more rarely in arbitrations than do employers. One recent study showed employees prevailing only 18 percent of the time in private arbitration.

As Justice Ginsburg pointed out in her dissent in Epic Systems, it can be very costly for individuals to pursue. In an earlier case involving Ernst and Young's arbitration program, an employee would have had to spend about $200,000 to recover close to $3,600.

Arbitration proceedings are often confidential. Companies often prohibit arbitrators from relying on past decisions & require them to keep outcomes confidential. Workers have no way of knowing what wrongs their company is perpetrating or how—or whether—those issues were resolved.

This is why closed-door, confidential arbitrations are especially bad for women facing sexual harassment. Arbitration can hide all the past misdeeds of a corporate executive who repeatedly harassed & abused female subordinates.

Forced arbitration is a tool employers use to prevent their employees from seeking justice in court when disputes arise in the workplace... Arbitration is like a private, for-profit court system, in which the employer usually gets to pick the judge.
epi.org/publication/te…

Mandatory arbitration panels overwhelmingly favor employers, with employees in arbitration winning only just about a fifth of the time (21.4%). In contrast, they win 36.4% of the time in the federal courts & 57.0% of the time in state courts @alexjscolvin epi.org/publication/th…

Differences in damages awarded are even greater, with the median or typical award in mandatory arbitration being only about one-fifth of the median award in the federal courts and well under half (43.0 percent) of the median award in the state courts.

Among private-sector nonunion employees, 56.2% are subject to mandatory arbitration procedures. Extrapolating to the overall workforce, this means 60.1 million American workers no longer have access to the courts to protect their legal employment rights. epi.org/publication/th…

The huge increase in mandatory arbitration clauses and the prohibition of class actions by workers are yet another example of how the American system is hugely rigged in favor of corporations and against workers. nytimes.com/2019/08/03/opi…

In my new book, Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor, I explain how corporate America, working hand in hand with Republicans has pushed to hobble labor unions & reduce worker power so that the system is now hugely rigged. penguinrandomhouse.com/books/246798/b…

Final point: if you're a worker who has been victimized by wage theft, race discrimination, gender discrimination, sexual harassment, good luck finding a lawyer if you can't bring a class action. Many lawyers balk at representing individual workers.