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Supreme Court Upholds Workplace Arbitration Contracts

nytimes.com

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Re: Supreme Court Upholds Workplace Arbitration Contracts

#111

Post by mmt »

sykh wrote: post #70
rayiner wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the Supreme Court overrules Abood in Janus, that'll be the Court doing its job to invalidate statutes that infringing Constitutional protections. Here, where there was no Constitutional concern, the Supreme Court did its job to give effect to a more specific Act of Congress (the FAA) over the more general policy in a different statute (the NLRA).

It is unreasonable in my opinion to consider Janus a constitutional issue. It's not a free speech issue even though it has been popularly cropped as such. People who benefit from collective bargaining ought to help pay for it. I'm not a lawyer and you'll be able to cite a thousand cases to my one. My sister's neighbor is on the state Supreme Court where I live. He's said to me that a good lawyer can argue any case an…

> It is unreasonable in my opinion to consider Janus a constitutional issue.

I'd agree with you if it weren't for the fact that this is about the government and government employees everywhere you look.

I never understood how we as a society and how the labor union movement could tolerate the existence of public employee unions in the first place, as they end up intermingling two otherwise very distinct worlds, as I believe has happened here.

What you call "collective bargaining" in this case I could call "pure political pressure", since the "bargaining" is against politicians.

That sounds awfully Constitution-ey to me.

Re: Supreme Court Upholds Workplace Arbitration Contracts

#112

Post by rayiner »

sykh wrote: post #70
rayiner wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the Supreme Court overrules Abood in Janus, that'll be the Court doing its job to invalidate statutes that infringing Constitutional protections. Here, where there was no Constitutional concern, the Supreme Court did its job to give effect to a more specific Act of Congress (the FAA) over the more general policy in a different statute (the NLRA).

It is unreasonable in my opinion to consider Janus a constitutional issue. It's not a free speech issue even though it has been popularly cropped as such. People who benefit from collective bargaining ought to help pay for it. I'm not a lawyer and you'll be able to cite a thousand cases to my one. My sister's neighbor is on the state Supreme Court where I live. He's said to me that a good lawyer can argue any case an…

The issue is that public unions are highly political animals. Being forced to fund them, just to have a government job, is akin to being forced to donate to a political party. We're not talking about neutral entities just looking out for worker's rights, but partisan entities typically in bed with the Democratic party.

Re: Supreme Court Upholds Workplace Arbitration Contracts

#113

Post by cookiecaper »

bhups wrote: post #51
cookiecaper wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a system that operates at the pace of 1776. That served us well for a long time, but since the post-war proliferation of mass media, it's hard to argue that it's adequate anymore. You're right that people don't understand the way the separation of powers works, but the system badly needs to be revised. The world has totally transformed in the last 75 years and it's much smaller now. Political and legal feedba…

> We have a system that operates at the pace of 1776. That served us well for a long time, but since the post-war proliferation of mass media, it's hard to argue that it's adequate anymore. I'd argue the exact opposite. The pace of our system is just a reflection of the current ideological polarization. Enacting Federal law requires a strong consensus (to prevent abuse), and the more polarized we are, the more diffic…

There is definitely something to be said for requiring broad consensus. I think many would argue that the systems were intentionally designed to be slow and convoluted because it meant that only the most important things would survive and get implemented, at least at the federal level. I don't necessarily disagree with that in principle, but "slow and convoluted" by 19th century standards is "worthless and disastrous" by 21st century standards.

Technology has brought us all much closer, and it requires us to re-evaluate many of our old ideas. Maybe it was easier to say "each state will handle things on its own" in the 1800s, when it could take days or weeks of walking just to get to the state line. Now, many of us would be able to get to our state's border and back over the course of a long lunch break -- to say nothing of boarding an airplane and traversing the entire continent in a single evening.

In the old days, the saying was that a lie can get around the world before the truth can pull its boots on. Now, massive knots of information, too intermingled to classify definitively as either truth or error, traverse the earth literally at the speed of light. Unfiltered recordings of many important events are now available across the planet a few seconds after they occur. When our political processes were designed, it would take months for highly-diluted summaries of information to percolate to the masses.

As a species, we are still coming to terms with our ridiculous new powers of instantaneous global mobility and communication, but it seems patently silly to me to insist that systems designed for the much slower and bigger world of the past will map onto today's world essentially without modification.

Re: Supreme Court Upholds Workplace Arbitration Contracts

#114

Post by cookiecaper »

sbov wrote: post #79
rayiner wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a false dichotomy. Corporations are the basic units of the wealth-creation engine that gives Americans among the highest standards of living in the world, not to mention employs almost all of them. Doing what's good for the corporations is usually also what's good for people.

The person you're replying to presented no such false dichotomy. They said when was the last time they sided with the people WHEN they were in opposition, not that they were always in opposition.

It's like asking "When was the last time Congress did something to help feet, instead of shoes?" It's a really weird thing to ask, because like shoes, corporations are a tool used by people. They cannot, therefore, be opposed to anything as such. They're merely mechanisms, tools, in the hands of their principals and agents.

You can suggest that certain uses of these tools are improper and that the agents who effect these uses should be restrained, punished, or otherwise legally addressed, but you don't phrase that as a punishment against the tool -- it is rather a punishment against the agents who manipulated the tool improperly.

Sometimes I wonder if the whole "corporation v people" thing is a propaganda tool intended to misdirect public anger off the robber barons themselves and instead put it onto a formless legal abstraction that can't be held accountable.

Re: Supreme Court Upholds Workplace Arbitration Contracts

#115

Post by kup0 »

bhups wrote: post #54
latortuga wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay sure. But don't lose track of reality in your quest for idealism though. There is a vast power imbalance between worker and corporation, both money and power. Businesses control the contracts, they have far more money, and, as a result, they have vastly more powerful lobbying. So in practice, there is no defense for workers anywhere! Kicking the can to "elect someone else" is just as naive as claiming that this…

> Kicking the can to "elect someone else" is just as naive as claiming that this decision respects the law on the books. But...it does respect the law on the books. Your concern seems to be that the law is bad, and that the judiciary ought to change that law. I don't think there's a lot of disagreement about the former, it's the latter that's more controversial. From an idealistic standpoint, enacting Federal law is…

Can't it be argued that SCOTUS's positions:

1. FAA is less broad than NRLA

2. NRLA does not override anything in FAA due to it being overbroad and/or things in the FAA not being "common policy"

are false, and thus the law on the books is not being respected?

#1 appears to be false and #2 is based on their erroneous position in #1. NRLA is more targeted than FAA and came 10 years post-FAA, so the argument that things covered in the FAA were not "common policy" at the time NRLA became law and thus wouldn't be overridden by NRLA seem ridiculous to me

Re: Supreme Court Upholds Workplace Arbitration Contracts

#116

Post by kevin_b_er »

Someone1234 wrote: post #6

Time to pressure congress to change this. A lot of people see SCOTUS decisions and think the matter closed, but congress with the flick of a pen could completely ban arbitration for employee contracts. The employer/employee relationship is by its nature power imbalanced. If employers band together and all require arbitration (as they likely will via a standardised templated contract) employees cannot do much.

The Republican Party supports forced arbitration against the public and they are currently in power.

Here is them overturning attempts to protect the public with courts of law: https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2017/10/25/republic...

Re: Supreme Court Upholds Workplace Arbitration Contracts

#117

Post by sykh »

rayiner wrote: post #112
sykh wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is unreasonable in my opinion to consider Janus a constitutional issue. It's not a free speech issue even though it has been popularly cropped as such. People who benefit from collective bargaining ought to help pay for it. I'm not a lawyer and you'll be able to cite a thousand cases to my one. My sister's neighbor is on the state Supreme Court where I live. He's said to me that a good lawyer can argue any case an…

The issue is that public unions are highly political animals. Being forced to fund them, just to have a government job, is akin to being forced to donate to a political party. We're not talking about neutral entities just looking out for worker's rights, but partisan entities typically in bed with the Democratic party.

There is no distinction between public employee unions and private employee unions. People are not forced to join unions. They are, for the time being, in some states required to pay for fair share dues to cover the costs of collective bargaining, grievances, and other administrative costs. People who join the union can get a refund of the portion of their dues that go to political activities.

Since you are making a distinction about public vs. private unions it appears that this is not a constitutional issue. It seems to be one where you don’t like that they generally endorse and support one party over the other. There are very few entities that are neutral. All sufficiently large entities become political to some degree.

Re: Supreme Court Upholds Workplace Arbitration Contracts

#118

Post by cookiecaper »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #66
rayiner wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're mixing up two different things: does the new thing fall within the old language, and would the drafters have used different language had they known about the new thing. Is a semi-automatic rifle an "arm" as the term was understood in 1789? Yes, almost certainly, in the same way an aircraft carrier is a "ship" as the term was understood in 1789. If semi-automatic rifles had existed in 1789, would the framers st…

We don't care about what they thought, just what they wrote. Uh, who's "we?" It sounds like you're describing textualism or strict constructionism, which are two of many types of judicial interpretation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_interpretation

True, but these theories have become popular in the US because within the parameters of the American republic, they're the theories that allow you to step back and say "OK, what did this law mean?". Other theories involve much more individual interpolation and personal judicial bias/opinion/whatever, which is what is usually meant when people say "legislating from the bench".

The people of the Great State of $YOUR_STATE are reading the bills as they're written and electing, instructing, and/or recalling their representatives according to the contemporary mainline meaning of the actual recorded text of the bill. The people of $YOUR_STATE don't know that $YOUR_SENATOR meant X when he said Y. Or even if they do, there's no way to know that the people of $BORDERING_STATE, who also supported the bill, had the same implicit caveat.

Thus, the only way to understand the meaning of laws enacted by "the People" is to interpret the recorded text as an average person contemporary to its passage would have understood it.

Re: Supreme Court Upholds Workplace Arbitration Contracts

#119

Post by makomk »

s73v3r_ wrote: post #95
charleslmunger wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent comment was a bit excited, but there are major differences between money you use for groceries and money used for union dues. The most relevant one to Janus is the fact that you can't choose which union your dues go to - but you have a number of choices about how to feed yourself with your dollars. You can go to a restaurant; go to Smart & Final; go to Whole Foods; in general, those dollars are fungible an…

"The most relevant one to Janus is the fact that you can't choose which union your dues go to" This is false; you can choose your workplace based on the union.

In which case you won't get to draw that government salary that would go towards the union dues, and whoever gets the job instead of you has to pay those same government dollars to the union. Hence they are in effect government funded; there's a pool of government dollars that are earmarked for their pockets, and the employee who's nominally paying the union has no actual control over this transfer of funds from government to union.

Re: Supreme Court Upholds Workplace Arbitration Contracts

#120

Post by s73v3r_ »

makomk wrote: post #119
s73v3r_ wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The most relevant one to Janus is the fact that you can't choose which union your dues go to" This is false; you can choose your workplace based on the union.

In which case you won't get to draw that government salary that would go towards the union dues, and whoever gets the job instead of you has to pay those same government dollars to the union. Hence they are in effect government funded; there's a pool of government dollars that are earmarked for their pockets, and the employee who's nominally paying the union has no actual control over this transfer of funds from gove…

That's like saying Cox is "government funded", as any government employee that has Cox as their cable provider is going to be paying that bill with money they got from the government.
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