Posts

#CareerAdvice : #GotFired – Can You Be #Fired for Joining A Walkout?

When hundreds of Wayfair employees walked off the job June 26 to protest the company’s sale of furniture to a migrant detention center in Texas, they brought politics directly into the workplace. It’s not the first time employees have staged a massive protest, and it certainly won’t be the last.

As an employment lawyer, I’ve watched employee groups increasingly use open dissent to change corporate behavior in matters that have nothing to do with their employment or the workplace. Their focus is must larger: corporate responsibility. Last year, Google employees publicly objected to that company’s plan to launch a Chinese search engine that would spy on Chinese citizens. In February, Microsoft workers walked out over their employer’s contract to supply augmented reality headsets for use in weapons systems.

Welcome to the brave new world of free expression for American workers and their employers.

The story

Wayfair employees disagreed with the company’s decision to sell furniture to a private contractor operating a federal detention center housing immigrant children near the border with Mexico. The $200,000 order, on which Wayfair stood to clear about $86,000 in profit, was just another business transaction for the company. For the Wayfair employees staging the protest, it was a stamp of approval for a reprehensible system that separates migrant families and imprisons children.

The employees had earlier signed onto a letter to executives asking the company to halt all current and future business with the government contractor and with other contractors operating migrant detention camps at the southern border. They demanded the company establish a code of ethics for business sales that “empowers Wayfair and its employees to act in accordance with our core values.” The employees also asked the company to donate profits from the sales to RAICES, a nonprofit that provides legal services to immigrants and refugees.

Like this Article ?  Share It !    You now can easily enjoy/follow/share Today our Award Winning Articles/Blogs with Now Over 2.5 Million Growing  Participates Worldwide in our various Social Media formats below:

FSC LinkedIn Network:   www.linkedin.com/in/fscnetwork

Facebook:  http://www.facebook.com/pages/First-Sun-Consulting-LLC-Outplacement-Services/213542315355343?sk=wall

Google+:  https://plus.google.com/115673713231115398101/posts?hl=en

Twitter: Follow us @ firstsunllc

Question: Want the ‘the best/current articles/blogs on the web’ on Job Search, Resume, Advancing/Changing your Career, or simply Managing People?

Answer: Simply go to our FSC Career Blog below & type(#career, #leadership, #life) in Blog Search:  https://www.firstsun.com/fsc-career-blog/

What Skill Sets do You have to be ‘Sharpened’ ?

Continue of article:

The law

If the Wayfair employees were hoping to be covered by federal law, they’re probably out of luck. Unless Wayfair was breaking the law — which it wasn’t — or the federal government was acting in a way that infringed the workers’ civil rights, the U.S. Constitution offers no protection. 

But laws in many states do provide protections for political activities. Such laws may even include “free speech,” “political activity” or “off-duty conduct” protections that give employees rights against private employers not provided by federal law. If employees in those states are fired for protesting, they can assert that they’re being punished for exercising their free speech rights under state law. Wayfair employees may be able to rely on state law if their employer retaliates against them.

The perception

This isn’t a matter of Wayfair engaging in illegal activity — it’s in the business of selling furniture — it’s a matter of optics and corporate goodwill. Earlier this year, massive employee protests prompted technology giant Google to do away with forced arbitration in its employment agreements. Arbitration is perfectly legal in the workplace, but Google decided that it didn’t play well in the court of public opinion. 

Similar protests have driven changes to arbitration policies at Uber and FaceBook. With sufficient public pressure, Wayfair could find itself moving in this direction with the perfectly legal sale of furniture to the federal government. 

The balancing act

The Wayfair protest is, ultimately, a game of chicken. Someone in corporate management runs the numbers to see how much money Wayfair loses for every hour its employees don’t work. They weigh this against the anticipated profit from the contract and factor in the potential cost of a breach of contract claim against the company by the government contractor. 

But protesting employees must also consider the costs they pay. Will they lose their jobs? Will they suffer other forms of retaliation? How long can they afford to stay off the job? There is tremendous strength in numbers. It’s highly unlikely that Wayfair will fire the protesting employees: How can it replace and retrain that quickly? Additionally, the size of the protest ratchets up the pressure by putting it on front pages all over the country. The power of a mass protest is a far cry from one or two workers taking a stand.

The power of voices

The Wayfair protest is a clear sign of the times. A decade ago, well before the advent of social media and crowdsourcing, the mobilization of a massive protest in a single day would have been unthinkable. In today’s connected world, people who share a belief system come together instantaneously to drive change.

Protests such as Wayfair, the 99 Percenters and the Amazon carbon footprint will only become more frequent and more powerful as these technologies are harnessed. Individual voices will become megaphones. The smartest businesses will get ahead of the trend by understanding the power of those voices and really listening to stakeholders — whether employees, investors or customers. Companies that fail to respect this power — the ones that blow protests off — will likely be brought to their knees. 

Where will Wayfair land?

 

Author: Ron Zambrano, Litigation Chair of West Coast Employment Lawyers, represents employees in equal pay, workplace discrimination and harassment, wrongful termination, whistleblower protection, wage and hour, and other employment-related claims. Zambrano has won millions in lawsuits on behalf on aggrieved employees from all walks of life and backgrounds, including high-profile cases against the city of Los Angeles, the Long Beach Police Department, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Boeing, Ralphs Supermarket, Carmax, Wells Fargo, Walmart, Macy’s and Curacao.

 

GlassDoor.com | June 27, 2019

#Leadership : #EmploymentLaw – Supreme Court to Weigh Workers’ Right to Sue Their #Employers …Conservative Majority’s Rulings in Three Cases could move more Disputes into Arbitration, Limit Class Actions

Employers are still trying to figure out how to keep their workers from suing them, as three cases currently before the Supreme Court test the limits of firms’ ability to move disputes into arbitration and out of court and the public eye.

With conservative justices in the majority, the court handed employers a victory earlier this year with a 5-4 decision affirming employers’ right to require workers to resolve complaints through arbitration and to bar workers from banding together in class actions challenging pay practices, discrimination and other alleged labor violations.

But the area of arbitration in the workplace remains fraught with uncertainty, as the new cases show, and the court is seeking to clear up some of the ambiguity. Two of the cases are scheduled to be argued before the court on Monday.

“These are issues that remain of importance to the big business community,” said Kalpana Kotagal, a plaintiff-side lawyer with Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC, a law firm that has represented workers in high-profile class action cases.

Advocates for sexual-harassment victims say that arbitration—which is generally a confidential proceeding, with little or no public paper trail—allows harassers and their employers to avoid public accountability and keep claims and settlements secret. Disputes are heard by arbitrators, often retired lawyers or judges, who are appointed by both sides in the conflict.

Employers often prefer arbitration, saying it is a faster and less expensive process than litigation. Worker advocates say that the process makes it harder to address systemic abuses such as pay discrimination because allegations can’t be consolidated into a single class-action lawsuit. Studies by Cornell University professor Alexander Colvin have found that arbitrations favor employers more often than litigation does, and result in lower awards for employees.

In arbitration, “employers get better results and lower chances of really large damage awards” to plaintiffs, said Mr. Colvin, now interim dean at Cornell’s ILR School. “One of the biggest motivating factors for employers is avoiding big jury awards.”

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has weighed in, filing briefs in support of businesses hoping to move more of their disputes into arbitration. In general, the court under Chief Justice John Roberts has been friendly to this position.

Like this Article ?  Share It !    You now can easily enjoy/follow/share Today our Award Winning Articles/Blogs with Now Over 2.5 Million Growing  Participates Worldwide in our various Social Media formats below:

FSC LinkedIn Network:   www.linkedin.com/in/fscnetwork

Facebook:  http://www.facebook.com/pages/First-Sun-Consulting-LLC-Outplacement-Services/213542315355343?sk=wall

Google+:  https://plus.google.com/115673713231115398101/posts?hl=en

Twitter: Follow us @ firstsunllc

Question: Want the ‘the best/current articles/blogs on the web’ on Job Search, Resume, Advancing/Changing your Career, or simply Managing People?

Answer: Simply go to our FSC Career Blog below & type(#career, #leadership, #life) in Blog Search:  https://www.firstsun.com/fsc-career-blog/

What Skill Sets do You have to be ‘Sharpened’ ?

Continue of article:

Workers may yet find allies in state courts. This month, the highest court in Kentucky made it illegal for employers to require workers to sign mandatory arbitration clauses as a condition of employment. The decision could be overturned if it is challenged and lands in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, legal experts say.

The three cases before the court hinge on largely technical questions, such as whether a carve-out in the 1925 Federal Arbitration Act—to exempt transportation workers from mandatory arbitration agreements—applies equally to employees and independent contractors, and whether arbitrators or courts should make final decisions about whether a dispute should go into arbitration.

In the transportation case, which was argued before the court earlier this month before Justice Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed, a truck driver named Dominic Oliveira filed a class-action lawsuit against New Prime Inc., the company he worked for as an independent contractor, for unpaid wages. New Prime argued that Mr. Oliveira was required to arbitrate his dispute. Mr. Oliveira said he was exempt from arbitration because of the transportation-worker carve-out.

New Prime asked the Supreme Court to decide whether the exemption applies to independent contractors, and whether such threshold issues—determining whether an arbitration clause is enforceable—should be decided by a court or an arbitrator. As with the content of lawsuits themselves, parties who want to have their cases heard in court prefer these preliminary decisions be made in court.

“These questions have a really big impact on employers because an arbitrator is more likely to determine that a case needs to be arbitrated,” said Katherine Sandberg, a management-side employment lawyer at Fisher & Phillips LLP.

Based on the oral arguments, observers expect the court to rule for the driver in this case, saying that a close reading of the FAA’s exemption for transportation workers includes independent contractors.

In one of the other cases, Lamps Plus Inc. v. Varela, the court will examine whether class-wide arbitrations are prohibited, even if an arbitration clause didn’t specifically bar class actions. If decided in favor of Lamps Plus, the case could lead to new curbs on class actions.

The final case, Henry Schein Inc. v. Archer and White Sales Inc., doesn’t concern an employment relationship; instead, it involves a dispute between manufacturers and a distributor. Like the New Prime case, though, it delves into the question of whether a court or an arbitrator determines preliminary questions, such as whether an arbitration clause should be enforced at all.

Legal experts say they expect to see the Supreme Court take up additional arbitration cases in the future. “The role arbitration plays in our legal system and our economy has grown so much that there will be a series of issues for the court to look at even after this year,” said Paul Bland, executive director of Public Justice, the watchdog organization that represents Mr. Oliveira in the New Prime case.

Write to Lauren Weber at lauren.weber@wsj.com

 

WSJ.com | October 23, 2018 | Lauren Weber