Court decision gives liberals a dose of reality
There’s an old adage that suggests a conservative is simply a “liberal that has been mugged.” This week, that aphorism received an update — as a nationally-publicized court case demonstrated that conservatism might be the inevitable result of a liberal simply trying to run a business.
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Madison-area-based Epic Systems in a dispute brought by employees against the software giant. At Epic and several other businesses, workers argued they shouldn’t be forced to sign contracts that allow for individual arbitration to resolve workplace problems, believing federal law protects their right to unionize and bargain collectively. The court found in favor of Epic, effectively ending the hopes of workers under arbitration contacts to seek collective action against their employers.
Epic is led by billionaire Judy Faulkner, an unabashed liberal and highdollar donor to Democrats. Faulkner has been a vocal critic of the state’s largest business group, Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, complaining about the group’s tendency to support conservative-leaning candidates. At one point, Epic boycotted firms that did business with WMC.
Ironically, Faulkner donated $5,000 to the effort to unseat Republican Gov. Scott Walker in a 2012 recall election, an election that only took place because of Walker’s attempts to weaken unions. But Faulkner is a businesswoman and has a multi-billion dollar property to protect. If regulating union activity in her own business is what it takes to protect jobs, that’s her choice to make.
“It is important that employers protect an employees’ right to file complaints, while also providing for a fair forum in which those grievances are addressed,” Faulkner said in a statement on Monday. “When it comes to grievances regarding wages and hours, we believe individual arbitration agreements strike that reasonable balance and are pleased with the court’s decision in support of this.”
And she is entirely correct. In the decision released this week, the Supreme Court simply upheld contracts willingly signed by both employers and employees that provided for arbitration in workplace disputes. Dispute resolution through arbitration has been governed by the federal Arbitration Act for nearly a century. The plaintiffs had hoped the court would use an entirely different federal law, the National Labor Relations Act, to nullify the contracts and allow them to sue businesses in groups. Yet the Arbitration Act and the NLRA, passed in 1925 and 1935, respectively, have always co-existed without conflict.
The question of whether arbitration-only contracts are desirable is a political one, not one for the courts to adjudicate. “The respective merits of class actions and private arbitration as means of enforcing the law are questions constitutionally entrusted not to the courts to decide,” wrote Justice Neil Gorsuch, “but to the policymakers in the political branches where those questions remain hotly contested.”
Fortunately, the Supreme Court kept the traditional firewall between the Arbitration Act and the NLRA, allowing businesses like Epic to grow their workforces and the economy. It’s a decision even a liberal should love.