SC begins work with employment dispute
Conservatives on rise
WASHINGTON, Oct 1, (Agencies): The US Supreme Court kicks off its new nine-month term on Monday with a major employment case that could deprive workers of the ability to join together to file lawsuits when taking on companies over a wide range of labor disputes.
The Trump administration will argue alongside companies that agreements requiring workers to arbitrate disputes with their employers individually, rather than bringing class-action lawsuits collectively with their coworkers, are valid.
Class-action litigation can result in large damages awards by juries and is harder for businesses to fight than cases brought by individual plaintiffs.
In an unusual twist, the administration will face off against an independent agency of the federal government, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
Republican President Donald Trump’s Justice Department in June reversed the government’s stance in the case taken under Democratic former President Barack and said it would not defend the NLRB’s position that employment agreements requiring workers to waive their rights to bring class action claims are invalid.
The NLRB argues that those agreements violate federal labor law and let companies evade their responsibilities under workplace statutes.
The three consolidated cases coming before the justices involve professional services firm Ernst & Young LLP, gas station operator Murphy Oil USA Inc and healthcare software company Epic Systems Corporation.
It is one of the biggest cases that the Supreme Court, with a 5-4 conservative majority since Trump’s appointee Neil Gorsuch was confirmed by the Senate in April, will tackle during a term that runs until the end of June. Other major cases involve voting rights, religious liberty and union funding.
At stake is the future of so-called class-action waivers, which employers have increasingly required employees to sign as part of their arbitration agreements to guard against a rising tide of worker lawsuits seeking unpaid wages.
The case against Murphy Oil arose in 2010 when Sheila Hobson — who had worked for the prior two years at a facility in Calera, Alabama — and three other employees, complained that they were not being paid for overtime and other work-related activities, including driving to competitors’ fuel stations to check their prices and signage.
“It just hit me. This is not right. I’m working off the clock,” Hobson said.
Her lawyer, former NLRB member Craig Becker, said people like Hobson might not file individual claims because of the fear of retaliation from their bosses.
Disputes
Many attorneys representing businesses say that resolving workplace disputes through arbitration with individual employees is a speedy and cost-effective alternative to class-action litigation.
In related news, disputes over a wedding cake for a same-sex couple and partisan electoral maps top the Supreme Court’s agenda in the first full term of the Trump presidency. Conservatives will look for a boost from the newest justice, Neil Gorsuch, in a year that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has said will be momentous.
President Trump’s travel ban appears likely to disappear from the court’s docket, at least for now. But plenty of high-profile cases remain. The justices will hear important cases that touch on gay rights and religious freedoms, the polarized American electorate, the government’s ability to track people without search warrants, employees’ rights to band together over workplace disputes and states’ rights to allow betting on professional and college sporting events.
Last year, “they didn’t take a lot of major cases because they didn’t want to be deadlocked 4-to-4,” said Eric Kasper, director of the Center for Constitutional Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. “This year, that problem doesn’t present itself.”
Gorsuch quickly showed he would be an ally of the court’s most conservative justices, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, most recently joining them in objecting to the court’s decision to block an execution in Georgia.
While justices can change over time, Gorsuch’s presence on the bench leaves liberals with a fair amount of trepidation, especially in cases involving the rights of workers.
The very first case of the term could affect tens of millions of workers who have signed clauses as part of their employment contracts that not only prevent them from taking employment disputes to federal court, but also require them to arbitrate complaints individually, rather than in groups.
Lagal
“I’m very fearful, given the new Supreme Court, of what will happen,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
Just on Thursday, the justices added a case that has the potential to financially cripple Democratic-leaning labor unions that represent government workers.
Taken together, the two cases “have a real chance of being a one-two punch against workers’ rights,” said Claire Prestel, a lawyer for the Service Employees International Union.
In the term’s marquee cases about redistricting and wedding cakes, 81-year-old Justice Anthony Kennedy, closest to the court’s center, remains the pivotal vote.
In an era of sharp political division, it may be now or never for the court to rein in excessively partisan redistricting. If the justices do set limits, their decision could affect elections nationwide.
The high court has weighed in several times on gerrymandering over the past 30 years, without agreeing on a standard that would allow courts to measure and oversee a process that elected lawmakers handle in most states.
But a lower court was convinced that Democratic voters’ challenge in Wisconsin to the Republican-led redistricting following the 2010 census offered a sensible way to proceed. The GOP plan seemed to consign Democrats to minority status in the Wisconsin Assembly in a state that otherwise is closely divided between the parties.
The only real question in the case is whether Kennedy will decide that partisan redistricting “has just gone too far” in Wisconsin and other states where one party has a significant edge in the legislature, but statewide elections are closely fought, said Donald Verrilli Jr, solicitor general during the Obama administration.