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The Modern Day Yellow Dog

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yellow-dog-contract

The yellow dog contract was common in early 20th century work. These entailed employers forcing workers to sign a contract that explicitly stated they could not join a union as a condition of employment. In the 1915 case of Coppage v. Kansas, the Gilded Age Supreme Court ruled this legal. Finally in 1932, the Norris-LaGuardia Act banned them.

The New Gilded Age Supreme Court has decided to take up the modern version of this, the binding arbitration contract.

The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to decide whether companies can use employment contracts to prohibit workers from banding together to take legal action over workplace issues.

The court accepted three cases on the subject. They follow a series of Supreme Court decisions endorsing similar provisions, generally in contracts with consumers. The question for the justices in the new cases is whether the same principles apply to employment contracts.

In both settings, the challenged contracts typically require two things: that disputes be raised through the informal mechanism of arbitration rather than in court and that claims be brought one by one. That makes it hard to pursue minor claims that affect many people, whether in class actions or in mass arbitrations.

I think we know where this is going and why Merrick Garland is not on the Supreme Court. Republicans saw a real threat to their plan to bring us back to the Gilded Age. And they were going to stop at nothing to kill that threat, ranging from unprecedented destruction of norms concerning confirming justices to approving of massive Russian interference in our election to allow Emperor Tangerine to take the throne despite his massive lawbreaking and impeachable offenses.

If the Roberts court, presumably up to 5 members thanks to Trump outsourcing his selections to Jim DeMint by the time oral arguments occur, there is almost no way it does not rule in favor of employers. To do so would take away one of the only tools workers have without unions to ensure some sort of rights on the job. Forcing mandatory arbitration returns the workplace to the Lochner era of the Gilded Age, where workers and employers were legally assumed to be equals in power on the job, inevitably resulting in the utter crushing of workers. Going back to this point is not the policy of Donald Trump. It’s the policy of the entire Republican Party.

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