No class action for unhappy Uber drivers: U.S. appeals court
reuters.com
reuters.com
I've spent money on lawyers' fees in order to make changes to offered contracts in the past, only to have them rejected outright. (It makes a certain amount of sense, as $CORP isn't going to have their legal team spend hours negotiating/revising a contract with a vendor that's only worth $NNk.) Unsurprisingly, this is not an area I and, I would imagine, others like me have a lot of room to experiment in: 1) lawyers are expensive and 2) missing out on that contract might mean missing out on $BILL payment. However, _most_ contracts I'm given these days contain an arbitration clause. Having had to sue someone in small claims court (I was successful!), I _loathe_ the idea of being forced into a kangaroo court.
Anyways, I'm not looking for free legal advice, I'm just curious to know how others are navigating this issue.
Even in cases where the arbitrator is a "neutral" party that both sides have to agree to, the companies are the ones bringing in the lion's share of work to the arbitrators and they are not going to agree to an arbitrator who rules against them in any significant quantities
Even in your statement here, there's evidence that the arbitration agreements are only in place because the companies can force it. B2B contracts usually have _actual_ negotiation involved instead of a take it or leave type of deal. Now that they can't force the agreements they are ambivalent about whether they are included.
If the arbitration agreements don't survive in contacts when both parties are on roughly equal footing and only show up when one party is much weaker, doesn't that imply that they are abusive?
> it dramatically reduces the cost of dispute resolution
... by being rigged in favor of the party setting it up.
https://www.epi.org/publication/correcting-the-record-consum...
Note that it's limited to arbitration involving financial companies though. Absolutely terrible to see what happens to normal people when companies can privatize justice.
Cant say the quality of this study, but it came up in recent discussions about the topic when the US supreme court ruled on a related matter, and claims "employees win 21 percent of arbitration cases, compared to 57 percent of cases in state court. " and "Workers also get less money when they're successful: $109,000 in arbitration compared to $575,000 in state court" (quotes pulled from a digg summary)
There is definitely a difference, but that has to be adjusted for the difference in expenses as well. For an employee who is successful, arbitration is also a lot cheaper than a court case.
"Contingency" doesn't mean it's free. If the case is won (which is the situation we're talking about), the lawyer gets paid out of the net recovery.
Yes, typically 33-45%. As I said in the original comment:
> There is definitely a difference, but that has to be adjusted for the difference in expenses as well
The company absolutely has an interest in not choosing the arbiter, instead contracting out that choice to some respected third party. Corporations win more frequently in arbitration because you are required to do work, you are required to be prepared, you don't have unlimited resources at your disposal, and you don't get to go on a fishing expedition in the form of lawsuit discovery.
>Corporations win more frequently in arbitration because you are required to do work, you are required to be prepared, you don't have unlimited resources at your disposal, and you don't get to go on a fishing expedition in the form of lawsuit discovery.
Every single point there is something that a party can win at if they have more money than the opposing party and companies always have more money. It's not like it's the poor, abused corporations who have to shoulder the massive legal cost against a random employee who can employ relatively limitless legal assets. You are flipping the narrative on documented reality.
Adding on to that, there is no way for there not to be bias I. The arbitrators. They are a business and the companies that have blanket arbitration agreements are going to be bringing orders of magnitude more cases to them than any employee.
That leaves you with one of three options. First is that the arbitrators decide in the companies favor more often, second is thatthey decides it as equally as the courts, and third is that they decide in the employees case more often. If it's the third case, why not just immediately settle with all employees instead of spending the time and money to set up a separate system to resolve disputes outside of the court? If it's the second case, why spend the time and money to set up a second system outside the courts to get a result that is the same as the courts? You can claim that it lowers costs, but companies are the ones that are increasing costs to ensure that they win. That leaves us with only the first case, where companies win more often, which is a complete lack of justice. Companies have moved past using their power imbalance to overwhelm employees in the court system, to just removing the employees ability to use the courts at all.
https://www.centerjd.org/system/files/ArbitrationWhitePaper.... https://www.bc.edu/content/dam/files/schools/law/bclawreview...
I had dealings with a national technology-based company over the past several years that involved fraud. Not on my part. It was obvious to me after some investigation that they had stolen several hundred dollars from me by causing charges on another account without asking my permission or clearly indicating that charges were being made. (I had to investigate to figure it out)
I was willing to let it slide and move on. Lesson learned. Then I saw a commercial for the company and realized: they were doing the same thing to tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of other customers.
It was really kind of mind-boggling when I thought about it. Who knows how much money was involved.
So I looked up a lawyer in a nearby large town who had experience and knowledge about class action suits in the technology arena.
We had a nice chat. I had accumulated a ton of paperwork to show what was going on.
He agreed. They were hurting a lot of people. On purpose. But he couldn't take the case.
Was it lack of proof? Broken laws? What?
It was arbitration. If I understood him correctly, arbitration clauses are destroying class action lawsuits. So you can legally screw over tons of people, then insist arbitration with the few that care if you get caught. And you get screwed over? You'd better not say anything about it because then you'd be slandering the company. After all, they haven't been found guilty of anything, right?
So how about regulatory agencies, I asked? Surely this violates some regulation that they operate under.
His view, if I understood him correctly, was that regulation was entirely political. It had nothing to do with them breaking any rules. It certain political contexts certain companies got the hammer. In certain other political contexts, they did not. In this particular case, he knew from the lay of the land that it was not worth pursuing.
I'm still taken back by our conversation. I had no idea that arbitration had effectively destroyed class action. I don't remember this ever being reported anywhere.
Again, if the story was true, there were ways to hold the company to the rules, get your money back, and avoid any legal costs of your own.
I can only relate to you what I heard. I viewed what happened as criminal. The company would have viewed it as covered under our contract. Nothing to see here, folks! I'm guessing the AG wouldn't take up a complex legal criminal case involving tech if it looked like there was a good chance it could end up a civil matter. And so we're still in civil court.
I tried proposing several different remedies during our talk. What if I sued by myself? It might work. I might get part of the monies back. Or not. In either case it'd take a while.
What if I went to the press? If there's no proof of anything, and I don't have a lawyer, I could be getting into risky legal territory. It went on like this for a few minutes. Admittedly, not being an attorney, I probably forgot to mention a lot of things.
I can assure you this happened. And I'm happy to explain it to anybody that would like to hear it off-the-record. It's a fucked-up situation and I would love more than anything else for there to be some remedy like you're describing.
It's just not worth my time, or the time of the attorney I consulted, to chase down a remedy that's only going to be a few thousand bucks. Situations like this are why you have class action suits in the first place. Hell, I'll give you the name of the attorney and you can call and ask him.
CA provides an online form for your type of complaint: https://oag.ca.gov/contact/consumer-complaint-against-busine...
If you would prefer to call them directly it's best to call your local CA office (numbers available on their website) and they'll connect you to the appropriate person. (I recommend this as they respond to you immediately; the form can take several weeks.)
I'm guessing the AG wouldn't take up a complex legal criminal case involving tech if it looked like there was a good chance it could end up a civil matter. And so we're still in civil court.
I'm not sure why you think this. What you described sounds like fraud, which is pretty simple from a legal perspective to investigate and prosecute at the scale you described. And the State AG would never turn down a criminal case just because they could also go after them civilly, as the criminal case strengthens their hand in the civil case.
I have dropped this issue as it is not worth my time. I'm simply relaying what another $600/hour professional told me as best as I can.
I apologize if I misrepresented any part of what that guy said. Since both you and the attorney I contacted seem to enjoy this legal stuff, if you have any confusion over what I've related, you two are welcome to chat. I'm happy to hook you up. Coming online and casting doubt on whether my story is true or not doesn't seem to be a very good use of either of our time either, and this is the reason I replied to you in the first place, not for some free legal consultation, online or otherwise. I'm happy to adjust my story if there's any part any HN commenter found that was in error. I've done the best I can to relate it.
As far as what I would think and why, I was just guessing. What I think is fraud or a civil matter or the prosecutorial leanings of my state AG? That and ten bucks will get you a nice cup of coffee. This kind of thing was the entire reason I spent an entire morning talking to the other bozo.
I'm not a California resident.
I appreciate your taking the time to reply here. I'm not sure either of us educated any of the other readers. My entire point was to offer to correct any errors in my story. I apologize to the rest of the forum that this line of discussion ended up rather pointless. My offer still stands. I have no desire to relate stories that are untrue, online or otherwise. If anybody has any questions, I am happy to do what I can to clear them up.
Uber isn't "forcing" anybody to do anything. The court is saying the contract is valid and the parties must work within the context of that contract.
Congress needs to act ... oh wait, silly me, I forgot they are beholden to corporations not voters.
In theory, people enter into contracts under their own free will. In reality, Uber has tremendous relative power in that relationship, like every relationship between a large corporation and an individual worker. Contract law, if I understand correctly, takes into account the relative power of the parties. As a simple example, Uber has a legal department to create and review the contract; most drivers don't have attorneys to even review it; many/most will not grasp the legal implications and they almost certainly can't negotiate it.
I'm not saying that invalidates all contracts and that the employee has no free choice, but it's false to say that Uber does not have much greater leverage.
I don't understand how legal system can be fair till the above is true. Individual, from the start, is on the loosing side. It should be illegal to sign things you are not qualified to understand. You can't get a prescription medication without a doctor reviewing your case first -- why can you sign a 100-page legalese? You are certain not to know what you are doing.
Arbitration is nothing more than a spectacle. Everyone is on the company payroll there, directly or otherwise -- house always wins.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Consumer_Law#Scope
> "Unfair terms are void, where they appear in standard form contracts signed with individuals "whose acquisition of the goods, services or interest is wholly or predominantly for personal, domestic or household use or consumption."'
This would not apply to the Uber driver case, but it would be a welcome change nonetheless.
It seems like one thing to do would be to make sure to rule against the company for small cases with limited damages, to keep up your credibility and ensure that the big cases always go in the company's favor. I don't know if arbitrators do this, but I wouldn't be surprised.
It really doesn't, at least not in the US.
There are a bunch of things that are necessary for a contract to be considered enforceable, but the two that are relevant here are "meeting of the minds" and "duress".
"Duress" is the obvious one, but it's a really high bar. It usually means something like physically threatened or blackmailed or literally locked in a room and told you can't leave until you sign. There's not generally a case that an employee or contractor was under duress from their future employer because they always had the option to not take the job in the first place.
"Meeting of the minds" is a bit more subtle. The parties have to believe they're agreeing to the same thing. This is also hard to show, though. Generally speaking, if you've been given the full text of the contract and had ample time to read through it then you are legally considered to know and understand its contents. There are a few cases where shrinkwrap licenses and extremely one sided terms of service get rejected under this theory, but it normally requires the parties to have signed materially different documents or for one party to be able to show that they weren't given adequate access to the document before they signed.
It's also worth noting that contracts are basically considered valid until proven otherwise. So even if there is a case to make that you shouldn't need to comply with some terms of a contract you are bound by you still need the resources (both in terms of relevant supporting documents and in terms of time and money) to actually prove that case in a court of law.
I've had American attorneys consistently tell me otherwise, though I've never had to put the idea into practice myself.
> So even if there is a case to make that you shouldn't need to comply with some terms of a contract you are bound by you still need the resources (both in terms of relevant supporting documents and in terms of time and money) to actually prove that case in a court of law.
Perhaps in theory, but IME the reality is the opposite: A contract is only worth what you are willing to invest the resources - money, time, attention, and frequently social/political capital - in enforcing.
We would be better of saying no company can offer employment on $obviously_bad_for_employee terms than letting the 'market' decide. Every employer benefits from this arrangement and no employer would have it in their contract if it didn't benefit them.
The power to just change jobs isn't as common and people on HN believe and that power is meaningless when most employers require arbitration. And why wouldn't they, it directly affects their bottom line.
Isn't that true of every item in the contract when it comes down to it, though?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract#Illegal_contracts
Obviously Ymmv, not a lawyer, free advice from random internet stranger, caveat emptor, etc, etc.
Hold on -- are you saying that nothing about employment contracts should be up to the market? What are you counting as obviously bad here? Different people would say that e.g. under $wage/hr is obviously bad, but then you're right back to price controls.
What are you criteria for when something should be up to the market?
The disagreement is merely over which side of that line arbitration clauses fall on. I happen to think that the right to have your grievances heard in court should be considered fundamental and inalienable.
It's not stupid. We are watching this happen. If you think companies should be free from any of this regulation or even discussion about their practices then you are free to go to Somalia and live in a regulation free utopia
I feel like you've lost sight of me simply taking objection to this histrionic idea of companies forcing people to work for them for 1c/hr. It's never going to happen, and you don't have to be a Somali pirate to see how absurd this argument is.
I've put forth no other argument about anything, regulation or otherwise.
Combine this with other controls on workers, like companies getting a say in whether or not you get unemployment, and workers are being forced more and more into a choice of do what the companies say or starve. I don't see how this doesn't end with virtual slavery like being forced to work for 1c/hr but you stand here and say its stupid and hyperbolic.
I admit that I did assign you a position you never stated. I have mostly seen arguments against discussing issues like this come from die hard libertarians who think there should be no sort of government interference in agreements between employees and employers and I made an assumption about you without evidence, for which I apologize
Firstly, apology accepted. Easy mistake to make.
Secondly, I just can't see us letting things go that far. We'll have to agree to disagree with that.
I do agree that binding arbitration clauses are terrible, and I accidentally put myself in a position where I had to sign one at my last job. We had worked out terms, and a start date and I quit my old job before I saw the employment contract. I went through and made edits, and the CEO was open to negotiating on it. There was a problem with their IP ownership clause he happily fixed, and if I wanted to, he was willing to get his lawyer involved in the removal of the arbitration clause. I let it go though because I would have been jobless if he decided I wasn't worth it.
The problem though is, how do you strike a balance between leaving people free to make economic decisions they deem in their interest vs being taken advantage of by predatory contract agreements? Arbitration and non-competes are bad, but I'm happy to agree to them...for a price.
So, what happens when a worker signs such an agreement and it is upheld under arbitration?
Am I missing something? There's a huge difference between negotiated wages between two parties (one being a union), and a law mandating a wage.
That's pretty glib and misses the point: labor laws like the minimum wage exist for a reason. The tl;dr is that the free market didn't solve the problems the laws were meant to solve 100 years ago, and the free market isn't going to solve them now (if the GP is corrected and forced arbitration gives employers a way to bypass the laws).
I've always wondered about the logic of the certain faction who wants to roll back basic protections of the rule of law to some fraction of society. Or actually, I get it - they always believe that they're in the fraction that will come out ahead, and can co-opt the enforcement mechanism to do their bidding. But I think a lot of these same interests underestimate the degree to which they depend upon the norms of functioning democratic society. Also common to high-corruption societies is the need to hire private security & intelligence forces to prevent a disgruntled rival from offing you and your whole family; are the new corporate oligarchs willing to go there, and live in that fear just so they can make more money?
That may well be true for some of the population, but I saw a large portion of employees whose viewpoint was, "Why wouldn't I do this? The company doesn't even pay me enough to live". I saw many times where it only took one bad week where someone went hungry for a few meals before they started stealing food or medicine. It won't take much for that viewpoint to spread as more and more people get pushed into the "have nots" group instead of the "haves"
If so, your definition of freedom is terrible.
That concern is weighed against other considerations, including whether or not to allow society to coerce individuals into degrading situations.
Law -- like any other human construction -- is about trade-offs.
The word “forced” is perfectly reasonable to use here. If I signed a contract requiring me to pay money, and I didn’t want to pay, and finally a court ruled that I had to pay; it would be fine to state that the court ruled the other party can force me to pay.
"Court Reminds Uber Drivers that Contracts Are Enforceable" or
"Drivers Waste Court Resources Only To Discover That Contracts Are Enforceable"
Of the three I think the "Uber did something wrong" framing is least accurate, but is probably the best clickbait.
Your other framings are completely bogus. They miss the actual news, which is that arbitration clauses, specifically, are enforceable. This was an open question with good reasons to think they wouldn't be, so "Contracts Are Enforceable" doesn't capture what's interesting about it, and "Drivers Waste Court's Time" is just plain wrong.
In my view one cannot pull this argument when talking about a dominant player in the market (which, I believe, Uber is, in many cities).
Here it is in a sentence:
By enforcing the terms of the agreement, Uber forced binding arbitration on the contractor.
If the contractor Filed a Complaint before a court in breach of the arbitration provision of the contract, Uber could have waived its contractual right to arbitration and allowed the case to proceed, but instead they forced the contractor into arbitration by enforcing the agreement. There is an obvious reason Uber elects to put the arbitration provision in its agreements and there is a reason they didn’t waive that provision when push cane to shove...it benefits Uber.
Your point that a party to a contract could waive their contractual rights is true but I would also argue that you are also choosing words to frame the narrative when you say the Uber "forced the contractor" rather than saying that Uber exercised its contractual rights to resolve the dispute via arbitration. In fact isn't the contractor who is trying to "force" Uber to give up its contractual rights by claiming that the contractual terms aren't valid? [edit: corrected are to aren't]
There is a larger discussion about the value/fairness of arbitration as a mechanism but as I understand it, it is established law that arbitration clauses are legal and I don't think anyone is arguing that Uber has "forced" someone to enter into the driver's contract with Uber.
It's a small difference but it matters. The power difference is a separate issue between employers and employees is a separate (important) issue, though.
The de facto effect is the same except in the rare case where a court sees the wording of the first kind of contract and dismisses the case on its own initiative, since otherwise the arbitration clause would only be enforced on the motion of a party, without which the right would be waived.
But it's not formalistically wrong to use the verb "force" to describe "exercising a contractual election" as opposed to merely "not waiving a default provision of the contract."
The fact that this particular contract involves Uber and drivers and an arbitration clause is irrelevant to the larger idea that contracts are indeed enforceable. That shouldn't really be news.
(That is: you have to pay money for an iPhone, and if you take it without paying the police may come after you.)
I personally think arbitration clauses in situations where the contract is essentially non-negotiable (company/user, company/worker) are basically a way for corporations to opt out of the civil court system, and one can make the case that they should therefore not be allowed (though this is a question for the legislature more than the courts).
In any case, you are absolutely right about the headline.
Sorry, can't sell you groceries unless you sign this.
[1] http://arbitrationblog.kluwerarbitration.com/2010/05/17/the-...
It's easy to think "You agreed, it's clear that you agreed, end of story" but that's not the way contract law actually works. If the parties aren't both getting a roughly equal deal and operating with roughly equal levels of good faith, everything changes.
And overall, that's a good thing. "If you don't like it, do something else" isn't much of an option when there's no other "real" option. "Go found your own company that works differently" is a farce for the vast majority of the population.
The theoretical ability to contest contract provisions is close to meaningless because the cost of litigation makes it inaccessible for the vast majority of the American people. Arbitration puts justice even further out of reach.
My point was that on this and related topics the "It's a contract, suck it up" type responses are based on a flawed basis, not that the result is actually just or fair.
Edit: I'm sorry, the parent comment was predicted on applying "there is no alternative" to the situation "whether you contract for Uber". That doesn't make sense, and I'd appreciate an answer besides a downvote. It seems like a fair question.
I just don't get the intuition for how a (relatively) new market entrant in a relatively new market can, in any meaningful sense, be such a vital option that the other side is powerless.
In a B2B contract like between Uber and its drivers, the contract is whatever the parties agree to (as long as there aren't any unlawful provisions), even if there does not appear to be a roughly equal deal.
But each arbitration is it's own case with it's own particulars. If a company screws over thousands of people, taking each of those to arbitration means that's thousands of hours more work then a single class action. Further, settlements are generally restricted to the specific issues a particular party has issue with, and there is generally no way to guarantee changes for the benefit of similar parties.
There are only two ways to counter unequal power in deciding contract terms that mandate arbitration, regulation or concerted action. But not a class action.
https://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?re...
The reasons to allow a non-owner, non-governmental power like a union to force the business to change can make sense and pull at your heart strings. I would prefer, if we are to encourage unions, that it stays about safety and let the free market sort the rest out. People can always find new jobs.
If that was the case, we would not need unions.
People can find new jobs, they just would prefer not to, but an employee’s preference and the business’ preference do not always match.
If collectively nobody works within each given business to improve workers conditions at that business where will all the disaffected workers turn for a better option.
Within an industry major players have no reason not to fix conditions at just crappy enough that people don't leave faster than we can hire new cogs.
Anyone who things the free market just magically fixes things ought to look at the labor market in the 20s.
Unemployment is near historic lows. Any employee dissatisfied can find a new job. Competition between employers drives better benefits, wages, and working conditions.
That's a presidentially arrogant statement to make, particularly in the middle of a discussion regarding the gig economy.
> The public typically perceives a low unemployment rate as reassuring because it suggests that everyone who wants a job has one. But the broader set of jobs data suggests that’s not the case. ”As usual, the consequences of truly no growth in the labor market leaves particularly politicians to emphasize nothing other than the unemployment rate,” Snider says.
https://qz.com/1297561/the-dazzling-us-unemployment-rate-is-...
Left to their own devices, large companies will just collude to fix wages. There needs to be a large-scale counterweight to the large-scale business. https://nypost.com/2014/04/24/tech-giants-settle-wage-fixing...
Do you see the contradiction in your belief?
A union exists to make the exercise of the employees rights more meaningful by doing so collectively. If you acknowledge that an individual employee has a right to ask for more money or changes to how the business is run and decline to come to work its difficult to understand how all employees don't have the same rights collectively.
Incidentally this is an instance of the free market. Labor is a market. They are selling YOU their time and collaborating to get a better deal.
So even if the business wants to fire unionized labor and find new and better labor, they can’t. They must now work through a tangle of rules to make changes to their business.
Those terms exist precisely to target the abuse you are describing: firing experienced, knowledgeable workers for "better" employees that are inexperienced and know jack-shit about what they're supposed to be doing and whose only qualifications are being cheaper.
Let's face it: in most unionized gigs, the contribution of each individual worker isn't significant, so the marginal gains of hiring a "better" worker is generally immaterial to the bottom line. In the cases where that's not true, the union contracts generally have reduced job protections that make it easier for underperforming workers to be let go (on the basis of objective criteria).
Though I would like some intermediate restrictions on the ability of an employer to summarily fire an employee for no good reason, short of extreme difficulty. Like, maybe some advance notice or severance payment in the absence of misconduct - the unemployment insurance regime is often severely inadequate, and gaps in employment make it harder to obtain subsequent jobs.
Plus some chance to refute allegations of underperformance makes sense - it can be real underperformance or it can be a cover for discrimination, both happen.
At the end of the day, unions are a means to organize labor. Individual workers have very little power against large corporations, especially if they end up conspiring with each other. You could take them to court, but they have more lawyers and more money to spend on them. We see the benefits of non-union representation now, but what happens when tech turns from feast to famine?
Here's them going on strike the other year: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/aug/31/bma-announce...
(written before their contract was ratified)
>Medicare-supported training slots are frozen where they existed almost two decades ago, perpetuating inequities in the geographic distribution of training slots and ignoring changes in the geography and demography of the U.S. population
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK248024/
https://www.aamc.org/advocacy/gme/71178/gme_gme0012.html
http://www.nrmp.org/board-of-directors/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Resident_Matching_Pro...
Median household income in the US is $59K. So the average nurse salary approaches the median of what a two-person household makes in America.
However, Uber also provides an easy way to view consumer price increases due to wage increases. I know that Uber has moved to more of a fixed-price model now, but let's pretend that Uber still had a per-mile/minute model. Uber charges $X per mile and $Y per minute and Uber takes 20% giving 80% to the driver. At that point, the absolute most that a union could increase driver wages without increasing consumer prices is 25%. If Uber was charging $1 and drivers were getting $0.80, if the union wanted a 50% raise Uber couldn't still charge $1 because drivers would be taking $1.20.
I think the network effects of Uber and Lyft make it hard for labor to have power in those situations. However, given that Uber's gross margin is a percentage of receipts, it's easy to see how it would push prices higher. I'm not saying it's not a worthwhile trade-off, but it's hard to argue that Uber drivers getting paid 25% more wouldn't cause fares to increase.
(Not that uber would ever do anything awful, of course.)
(To be clear, I'm not saying you disagree with any of these points, these are just my $.02.)
Not that many drivers actually drive full-time for a living. A lot of them are just temps. They do some driving on the weekend to make some extra money, they're doing it temporarily while they're between jobs, and so on. If they get fed up with Uber and Lyft, they'd be more likely to just walk away than fight.
Case in point: I rode with one guy a few months ago who was on paternity leave... he took up Lyft driving because his wife had no paid maternity leave so he drove during his three months paid paternity leave to make up for the family missing out on his wife's income for a few months. Once his wife is working again, he's done driving.
And we're also, as a society, at a point where service jobs are almost fungible. If McDonald's fires you, you can get a job at Taco Bell. Even the same kind of service job doesn't matter. If you get tired of Uber jerking you around, you can find a restaurant and become a waiter. None of the skills involved in these jobs are particularly hard to train for. Every service job is going to require that you have basic customer service skills, and you can take those from job to job. Driving is a fundamental skill in most of America; if you can drive a car and understand Google Maps, you have the skills to drive for Uber or Lyft. For other service jobs, you don't need years of experience to take people's orders at a counter, scan groceries, or do tier 1 customer support.
When unions first came to prominence, we had an industrial economy, not a service-based one. Chances are, you lived in a small town where there was just one factory, and the town probably only exists because of the factory. If you got fired, you were screwed. If the factory closed, everyone in town was screwed. And if you've been working with the same specialized proprietary factory equipment for years, it's going to take a long time to re-train you on another factory's equipment, so that's another disincentive to switching jobs. Hence unions.
tl;dr Service workers, including Uber and Lyft drivers, don't unionize because losing your job doesn't mean that you and your family are hopelessly screwed.
Ignorance is bliss I guess?
The economic research of the effects of unions on consumer pricing is well established. That you choose to willfully disbelieve the economic research in that area unfortunately does not make it less valid.
And collusion of employees (unions) is permissible. Collusion of businesses is less so.
Three-judge panel, 9th Circuit.
- Richard R. Clifton, authored opinion (app. GW Bush, Repub.)
- Richard C. Tallman (app. Bill Clinton, Repub- see wikipedia)
- Sandra S. Ikuta (app. GW Bush, Repub, Fed Soc member)
fn arbitration() {
return rulingFor(billing.client);
}
You actually cannot sign away your basic rights as contract cannot supersede state or federal law. You may argue that one's right to litgation _should_ be considered a basic right, but currently it's not.
Alexender Hamilton: "The civil jury is a valuable safeguard to liberty."
Thomas Jefferson: "Another apprehension is that a majority cannot be induced to adopt the trial by jury; and I consider that as the only anchor, ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of it’s constitution."
They tried, but greed is too strong. You've lost the right to a trial by jury. What little bit is left is dead under mandatory binding arbitration.
Cynicism aside, this is a result of freedom of contract right? I'm still not sure how it's enforceable to agree to use a different legal system: if both parties are in the US they can agree to be bound by French law instead? Or a coin toss to resolve disputes?
Also http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/05/the-right-to-waive-your...
"CHAP. 218.-An Act To make valid and enforceable written provisions or agreements for arbitration of disputes arising out of contracts, maritime transactions, or commerce among the States or Territories or with foreign nations."
The court will not decide the unconscionability of that contract. An arbiter will. The conscionability of a contract that has mandatory binding arbitration must be decided by the arbiter. The courts are only involved in enforcing the arbiter's judgement, which is not subject to any review. The arbiters judgement is not subject to the courts. The arbiter could decide you were meant to be a slave by the contract or another arbitrary decision[1] that has nothing to do with the contract and assign you a 10 million dollar penalty. Under US arbitration, I argue you have no real rights. With no limit to financial penalty and no review by courts of law other than to compel others to steal your property at the whim of an arbiter, there are no real rights left.
[1] Arbiters are not limited to the subject of the contract nor are they limited to the subject of the dispute.
This is wrong on so many levels. This is one of the reasons why euthanasia is not legal; you cannot legally write a contract to get yourself killed: the person who kills you will be a murderer regardless if the murder was consensual. Similarly, you cannot consent to slavery.
Except where it is legal:
Yes, it does change your point, because if what you implied was correct, euthanasia would not be legal anywhere.
One reason we have this rule is that when people break it—especially when they break it to editorialize—the comments tend to fill up with distracting arguments about the title.
I copied and pasted the original title, as I always do -- I'm familiar with the guidelines (and have in fact brought similar issues to the mod's attention before).
Thank you for addressing the issue.
I will mark this subthread offtopic and collapse it, and delete my other comment about the title.
[1] https://www.xfinity.com/Corporate/Customers/Policies/Subscri...