Google Ends Forced Arbitration for Employees

Post by TomVDB » Thu, Feb 21, 2019, 10:41 PM UTC

briandear wrote: post #36

riffraff wrote: post #19

Why isn't forced arbitration illegal? You're effectively agreeing to renounce to your rights to sue a company. Seems odd that US laws allows that. Or, is the clause only that arbitration has to be attempted but not binding to the fact that an agreement may be reached? This case would seem far less evil.

> You're effectively agreeing.. You are agreeing. As an adult, the choice to agree or not agree to conditions of a private transaction seem to be a fundamental liberty. If people didn’t agree and it affected recruitment, then companies would respond accordingly. Also, without arbitration, conceivably that could result in a lower offered salary to offset the risk of litigation. Given that the vast majority of employee…

Post by everdev » Thu, Feb 21, 2019, 10:42 PM UTC

enraged_camel wrote: post #37

ChuckMcM wrote: post #10

Wow, you mean collective employee action can be used to force an employer to stop exploitative behaviors? Who knew? :-) I'm really glad to hear that Google made this step, now if they would drop the overly expansive ownership claim in their employment agreement and the right to surveillance on personal property it would be a much more employee friendly place. I also hope that it gives them an edge in hiring which wou…

>>Wow, you mean collective employee action can be used to force an employer to stop exploitative behaviors? Who knew? :-) This is why we need unions, period. edit: It’s always amusing to see HN readers start pant-shitting whenever someone posts a comment in support of unions. :)

Post by anth_anm » Thu, Feb 21, 2019, 10:43 PM UTC

sand500 wrote: post #35

dtech wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arbitration comes from agreements on how to settle future disputes being legal [1]. If two company agree to settle through a chess match between their CEOs instead of suing, by all means let them. This is obviously problematic in cases where there is a significant power discrepancy (employee-employer, producer-consumer etc), or where arbitrators are paid by a single party. Despite this, US suspreme court has held tha…

Sure but let anyone do voluntary arbitration not forced.

Post by Datenstrom » Thu, Feb 21, 2019, 10:44 PM UTC

m0zg wrote: post #27

ChuckMcM wrote: post #10

Wow, you mean collective employee action can be used to force an employer to stop exploitative behaviors? Who knew? :-) I'm really glad to hear that Google made this step, now if they would drop the overly expansive ownership claim in their employment agreement and the right to surveillance on personal property it would be a much more employee friendly place. I also hope that it gives them an edge in hiring which wou…

>> overly expansive ownership claim Yeah, that particular clause gave me a looong pause before signing their contract, in fact I even seriously considered taking one of the other offers I had. This is why you see all those "happens to be owned by Google" disclaimers on open source projects. This means the person wrote this code on their own time, yet it's owned by Google anyway, which IMO is total employee-hostile bu…

Post by my_username_is_ » Thu, Feb 21, 2019, 10:44 PM UTC

ergothus wrote: post #34

ChuckMcM wrote: post #10

Wow, you mean collective employee action can be used to force an employer to stop exploitative behaviors? Who knew? :-) I'm really glad to hear that Google made this step, now if they would drop the overly expansive ownership claim in their employment agreement and the right to surveillance on personal property it would be a much more employee friendly place. I also hope that it gives them an edge in hiring which wou…

> collective employee action can be used to force an employer to stop exploitative behaviors? I'm all for balancing the employer employee interaction, but is this truly something that works for most industries? Google cares about it's reputation among potential tech employees. Other areas (say, Amazon warehouses) probably have a lot less trouble finding people desperate for work and willing to put up with crap becaus…