On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled in a landmark case that employers can include a clause in their employment contracts that requires employees to arbitrate their disputes individually, thus waiving the right to resolve those disputes through joint legal proceedings.
The vote was 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts, Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch concurring. Gorsuch wrote the opinion, which resolved three disparate cases: Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis, Ernst & Young LLP v. Morris and National Labor Relations Board v. Murphy Oil USA. All three cases were precipitated by an employee who had signed an employment agreement that contained an arbitration provision filed a lawsuit in federal court. The plaintiffs desired to bring individual and collective claims. The employers countered that under the terms of the arbitration agreements, the employees needed to go to individual arbitrations.
Writing the majority opinion, Gorsuch noted that the conflict between the Federal Arbitration Act, passed in 1925, which stated that an agreement to arbitrate a dispute “shall be valid, irrevocable, and enforceable” and the National Labor Relations Act, passed in 1935, which stated that employees had the right to work together for “mutual aid and protection,” was very recent. He pointed out that it was in 2012 when the National Labor Relations Board suggested that “the NLRA effectively nullifies” the FAA in cases like the ones before the court. – READ MORE
[give_form id=”79809″] [contentcards url=”https://www.dailywire.com/news/30952/why-gorsuch-mattered-scotus-protects-businesses-hank-berrien” target=”_blank”]