It’s Against The Law But…

You can’t do anything about it.

Your landlord throws you out when you transition and there is nothing you can do.

Your employer allows your fellow employers to harass you because you’re trans and there is nothing you can do.

Staff at a long term care facility tells the residents that you’re trans and there is nothing you can do.

Your state can have the best laws but you can use them because you signed away your rights. You say that you would never do that but you have already have.

Dr. Jillian Weiss in her blog LGBTQ WORKPLACE LAW & DIVERSITY writes…

Venable Next For Students Pushing To End Forced Arbitration - Law360
Harvard law students are advocating job candidate boycotts of law firms requiring forced arbitration of disputes. They have been successful in doing so. The same should be done in other industries as well. Forced arbitration basically means that employers can force you to a kangaroo court that favors their enormous resources and leaves you with zero leverage. This removes all the brakes on their bad behavior, which happens with surprising regularity, Law360, Boston (February 4, 2019, 2:42 PM EST)

You have probably signed away your rights when you opened an account for your utilities, when you signed your lease, when you got your new job, or when you got that new credit card. You willingly signed away your legal rights.

Supreme Court Upholds Workplace Arbitration Contracts Barring Class Actions
New York Times
By Adam Liptak
May 21, 2018

WASHINGTON — 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.

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.”
[…]
Brian T. Fitzpatrick, a law professor at Vanderbilt University who studies arbitrations and class actions, said the ruling was unsurprising in light of earlier Supreme Court decisions. Justice Gorsuch, he added, “appears to have put his cards on the table as firmly in favor of allowing class actions to be stamped out through arbitration agreements.”

Dr. Jillian Weiss in her blog writes,

"…It’s quite problematic, they are using forced arbitration to impede justice,” Coleman said. “There are limitations on discovery explicitly listed in the policy ... We have read a lot of these policies. Venable's was jaw-dropping.” Coleman noted that disputes stemming from allegations of harassment, retaliation, age discrimination and wages and rows under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 and the Fair Labor Standards Act are pressed into arbitration, among others. “There is essentially no claim you can bring that would not fall under this policy…”

Binding arbitration agreements are everywhere!

It is impossible to get a credit card, utilities, jobs, rents, or just about anything else without signing an arbitration agreement. The decks are stacked against us and the states can’t do anything because the federal law trumps state laws.

Binding arbitration has its place but its place is not to shelter companies from obeying the law. I think that binding arbitration has its place in billing disputes only.

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