Some lawyer thoughts on the law

"ImmoralMinority" (araimondo) 12/06/2018 at 09:32 • Filed to: None

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Yesterday, I was in mediation for 11.5 hours

This was my first big plaintiff side case with a contingency fee, and we settled it. It was actually 3 cases against the same employer. To be honest, I really don’t know how I feel about it. I got the clients some money, but I don’t feel like I accomplished anything. On the defense side (at least in my practice) there is a stronger relationship with a client, and there is usually a sense of a job well done and a problem solved. This one was just money. I can’t say I liked it.

I think part of what is bothering me is what I see in the area of law I am in. We do all these wage class actions, and they don’t get shit for the people. I settled a defense case not long ago for $680,000, for a class of 700 (attorneys fees come out before distribution) . Last night, I got $700,000 for 85 people on the wage case , which after fees should get most folks around $3000-$5000. We got a great settlement for this type of case, but that doesn’t feel like I did much for these people, and I get a big fee. Honestly, it is a lot easier to make money doing this as opposed to defense.

The other parts of the thing involved harassment and retaliation. Our plaintiffs had signed agreements to arbitrate their claims, and that denied us the ability to get in front of a jury. These agreements are legal, and you are going to see them everywhere. The reason is that they work. If they had faced a jury, they would have paid 7 figures to settle the case, but facing an arbitrator they have all the leverage. Arbitrators know that their bread is buttered by big defense firms, and they conduct themselves accordingly. Most are old white dudes, and very conservative. The US Supreme Court has upheld the use of these agreements. As a result, we are in the process of establishing a private litigation system for employment disputes where juries are not part of the equation. This does not sit well with me. I trust juries more than judges.

So here is the perspective of someone who has been practicing labor and employment law for 20 years:

1. We do have a litigation system that is out of control. At present, lawsuits primarily benefit lawyers, are arbitrarily punitive, and corrupt lawyers with greed. The core of the problem is wage and hour class actions, which are little more than legalized extortion. Lawyers on both sides get rich, the people get pennies, and business as usual continues. It isn’t working. In a state like California, compliance has become impossible, and risk cannot be eliminated. So employers are running to get people to sign arbitration agreements that block class actions. Even I could not resist the lure of the money when my associate brought this case to me. It is a real problem.

2. We do need an effective venue for workers to vindicate their rights, and for basic labor standards to be enf orced. Court is not working, at least for class actions. Wage and hour law has become chaos in California, with courts making law in ways that are upending entire industries. It isn’t helping workers, and it hurts businesses. I don’t know what the answer is, but I know it isn’t arbitration. To me, the starting point is admitting we have a problem and we need to find a different process for these types of disputes. That could take a variety of forms, but we need to acknowledge that where we are isn’t working.

Remember t his post when your boss puts that arbitration agreement in front of you, and that they can require you to sign it. Then if they sexually harrass you or discriminate against you, they can pay you off at a discount. The politics on both sides are fucked, and in the end, the workers get the short end. And no, I have not made my employees sign arbitration agreements, but I insist that my clients do. I never said I was any better than all the rest.

Nibby > ImmoralMinority 12/06/2018 at 09:39

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MOON GORGEOUS MEDITATION!

A spectre is haunting America — the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.

Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?

Two things result from this fact:

I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power.

II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims,

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master (3) and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.

From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.

The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.

The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop.

Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacturer no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry; the place of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.

Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.

We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.

Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association in the medieval commune (4) : here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany); there taxable “third estate” of the monarchy (as in France); afterwards, in the period of manufacturing proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone of the great monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.

The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralised the means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralisation. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier, and one customs-tariff.

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?

We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organisation of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.

Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class.

A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.

The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.

But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons — the modern working class — the proletarians.

In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed — a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.

Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labour, is equal to its cost of production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases. Nay more, in proportion as the use of machinery and division of labour increases, in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours, by the increase of the work exacted in a given time or by increased speed of machinery, etc.

Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.

The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labour, in other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labour of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex.

No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far, at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.

The lower strata of the middle class — the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants — all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialised skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.

The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first the contest is carried on by individual labourers, then by the workpeople of a factory, then by the operative of one trade, in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not against the bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments of production themselves; they destroy imported wares that compete with their labour, they smash to pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages.

At this stage, the labourers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their own active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, which class, in order to attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover yet, for a time, able to do so. At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeois. Thus, the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie.

But with the development of industry, the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalised, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The increasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon, the workers begin to form combinations (Trades’ Unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there, the contest breaks out into riots.

Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes. But every class struggle is a political struggle. And that union, to attain which the burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern proletarian, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years.

This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier. It compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself. Thus, the ten-hours’ bill in England was carried.

Altogether collisions between the classes of the old society further, in many ways, the course of development of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all time with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles, it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own elements of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie.

Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling class are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress.

Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the progress of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.

Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.

The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.

The “dangerous class”, [ lumpenproletariat ] the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.

In the condition of the proletariat, those of old society at large are already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family relations; modern industry labour, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.

All the preceding classes that got the upper hand sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.

All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.

Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.

In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.

Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of the feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern labourer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the process of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident, that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.

The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

Azrek > Nibby 12/06/2018 at 09:44

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TL;DR!

facw > ImmoralMinority 12/06/2018 at 09:46

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My company asked people to sign arbitration agreements, but you could opt-out, which I did. Apparently most people just signed it, whether because they’ll just sign whatever is put in front of them, because they bought the line that it protects workers from high legal costs , or because they feared retaliation if they opted-out (or all three) . For me though, even aside from knowing that arbitration almost always favors businesses (who may bring many cases to arbitration, vs. workers who are unlikely to be repeat customers), it seemed obvious that they wouldn’t be relentlessly pushing people to sign the arbitration agreement if they didn’t think it benefited them.

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > ImmoralMinority 12/06/2018 at 09:47

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“YOU BETRAYED THE LAW!”
“LAWW!”

I read and agreed with the post, but Judge Dredd gifs are mandatory.

$kaycog > Nibby 12/06/2018 at 09:51

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Nibby > $kaycog 12/06/2018 at 10:01

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fintail > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 12/06/2018 at 10:06

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Andyyyyfivepointoh > Nibby 12/06/2018 at 10:40

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I read way more of this post at work then I should of, and now I’m thining “ why am I slaving away for just enough pay to get by in life. My employer   pays me just enough to pay half my rent every month, put shitty processed food in my belly, and put   gas in my Honda to get back and forth to work.   FUCK this shit

Highlander-Datsuns are Forever > $kaycog 12/06/2018 at 10:41

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She wants to call a friend but just read a Nibby post.

Highlander-Datsuns are Forever > ImmoralMinority 12/06/2018 at 10:44

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It does seem wrong to me too. If your employer stiffed you $10,000 in overtime pay you should get that plus inte rest back. It sounds like that is not the case and the employers are savvy and making everybody sign these arbitration agreements.

DipodomysDeserti > ImmoralMinority 12/06/2018 at 10:50

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“ We do need an effective venue for workers to vindicate their rights, and for basic labor standards to be enforced.”

There’s always street justice. Rich white guys are terrified of it.

RPM esq. > Andyyyyfivepointoh 12/06/2018 at 10:51

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I’m pretty sure that’s exactly the reaction its authors wanted you ( and all the other working people who have read The Communist Manifesto in the p ast 170 years) to have.

RPM esq. > Nibby 12/06/2018 at 10:53

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I see what you did, and I like it.

Sovande > ImmoralMinority 12/06/2018 at 11:12

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“We do need an effective venue for workers to vindicate their rights, and for basic labor standards to be enforced.”

We had that. It was called “court.” Lawyers then turned it into a money making machine for themselves instead of as a means of recourse for the wronged.

You can’t pat yourself on the back for recognizing the system has failed and then go out and collect high fees for doing exactly what you claim is wrong with the system. It’s disingenuous and hypocritical.

“Even I could not resist the lure of the money when my associate brought this case to me. It is a real problem.”

The real problem here is pretty easy to identify. Lawyers in cases like this should be better people and stop exploiting the working class on behalf their your clients as a means to easily collect high fees. There are tons of ways to earn money that don’t involve fucking people over as a business model.

Nibby > Andyyyyfivepointoh 12/06/2018 at 11:21

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:D

Nibby > RPM esq. 12/06/2018 at 11:23

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Thanks!

Future Heap Owner > ImmoralMinority 12/06/2018 at 12:07

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Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this. The practice of forced arbitration agreements is something that concerns me.  It’s interesting to read your perspective.

XJDano > ImmoralMinority 12/06/2018 at 12:28

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Now that you’re done doing lawyer stuff, you can do some internet stuff and check your email for the link to join the Secret Sena Group.

Just saying.

:-P

RPM esq. > Future Heap Owner 12/06/2018 at 13:26

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I run into them all the time in practice too. They are really bad for all normal people and their legal rights —employees, consumers, medical patients, etc.

Spamfeller Loves Nazi Clicks > ImmoralMinority 12/06/2018 at 13:29

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Contract terms that RootWyrm won’t agree to, in no particular order.

Forced Binding Arbitration, goes triple for JAMS
Requiring third party mediation is OK. Non-binding arbitration, also OK . I’m not unreasonable here.

“All work you produce belongs to the company.”
NOPE. I do shit outside of office hours on personal equipment? You have no rights to it whatsoever. Get fucked.

Non-Competes*
* - I’ll sign ‘em sometimes, just because the idiots always select CA, which means the non-compete is completely invalid . And if they want to play games? They can’t meet the standard to enforce in Ohio either.

“Provide Your Own Tools” clauses
NOPE. I work in IT. I have my own tools. Those are my tools, my licenses, my equipment. Same goes for automotive though - I’ve HAD to buy special tools for myself. I know what they cost.

“You have to give us 90 days notice.”
Nope. The accepted standard for decades has been two weeks. Though I will agree to that if it’s a fixed term contract. If I leave in the middle of that, then yes, it does real harm.

Exclusivity clauses
I have no problem saying I won’t work for a direct competitor at the same time. No issues contractually agreeing to an honest 40 hours a week. But you do not pay me anywhere near enough to get to fuck with the business I have spent two decades developing. Especially when it’s not even the same damn industry.

No Additional Compensation clauses
If you’re giving me additional responsibilities, you’re giving me additional money. Don’t like that? Don’t give me additional responsibilities.

Choice of Law in a state of convenience
You can choose the state I live in, you can choose a state you have a significant presence in , or you can choose the state HR is located in. I am not agreeing to a contract governed by an employee-hostile state’s laws that you don’t even have an office in.

Vague “good faith” terms
If you can’t define what ‘good faith’ constitutes in writing, and you assume I have reason to or will act in bad faith? Why are you even extending an offer in the first place? (Not talking about the boiler plate ‘blah blah all parties expected to act in good faith’ stuff.)

Most “gag” clauses
‘Indefinite non-disparagement with liquidated damages ’ is one of my favorites here. Not unless I get the same rights including being entitled to immediate injunctive relief and claiming permanent irreparable harm in the tens of millions.

“Train your replacement” clauses
Nope. Just nope. Not happening. I have no obligation to eliminate my own job, I have no obligation to help you replace me with someone cheaper. You want me to train a replacement, that’s a whole new negotiation.

haveacarortwoorthree2 > ImmoralMinority 12/06/2018 at 15:34

1

I trust juries more than judges.

I don’t if the case has any complexity to it at all or is going to last longer than 2-3 days. Standard PI stuff -- yeah, juries do ok with those types of cases.