The Supreme Court says employers can prohibit their workers from banding together to complain about pay and conditions in the workplace. The justices ruled 5-4 Monday, with the court's conservative members in the majority, that businesses can force employees to individually use arbitration to resolve disputes, per the AP. The outcome is an important victory for business interests. An estimated 25 million employees work under contracts that prohibit collective action by employees who want to raise claims about some aspect of their employment. As USA Today notes, many don't become aware of the restriction until a workplace issue surfaces and they learn they're barred from joining a class-action suit. The Trump administration backed the businesses, reversing the position the Obama administration took in favor of employees.
The court's task was to reconcile federal laws that seemed to point in different directions. On the one hand, New Deal labor laws explicitly gave workers the right to band together. On the other, the older Federal Arbitration Act encourages the use of arbitration, instead of the courts. Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority, said the contracts are valid under the arbitration law. "As a matter of policy these questions are surely debatable. But as a matter of law the answer is clear," Gorsuch wrote. In dissent for the court's liberals, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called the decision "egregiously wrong." Ginsburg said that the individual complaints can be very small in dollar terms, "scarcely of a size warranting the expense of seeking redress alone."
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