Microsoft Backs Bill To Give Harassment Cases Their Day in Court, Waives Its Own Arbitration Clauses (geekwire.com) 73
Microsoft is throwing its weight behind a Senate bill that aims to ensure victims of workplace sexual harassment can make their case in court. In doing so, Microsoft has become the first Fortune 100 company to back the bipartisan effort to ensure that companies aren't able to keep such allegations from becoming public. From a report: The tech giant says it's also waiving its own arbitration requirements for harassment claims in the "small segment" of Microsoft employment contracts that contain them. Microsoft says it has never enforced an arbitration requirement in a sexual harassment case. However, the requirement does exist in employment contracts with some Microsoft corporate vice presidents, legal and corporate affairs employees, and company founders who joined Microsoft through acquisitions.
What is Microsoft's motive? (Score:2, Funny)
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It's a cultural shift. More will follow. I suppose the true rational reason would be companies don't want to face the PR/financial backlash of anything that was held back being released.
Or this could be the rarely seen phenomenon of humans being of genuine human beings.
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Please. MS is more of an old-boys club than any tech company I could think of. Maybe with the exception of IBM.
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Re: What is Microsoft's motive? (Score:1)
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It's technically possible that MS is trying to be less evil.
Or maybe they're just afraid of what could happen if they went about this the WRONG way and got caught up with it. Sometimes doing the right thing applies to business and people decisions.
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No.
Want proof? Windows 10.
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Not everything Microsoft does is to harm Linux... Most things Microsoft does doesn't even factor Linux in the equation. I am sorry Linux and Open Source isn't all the special.
Back on topic...
I expect arbitration is rather expensive to operate at the trade off of being easier. Get a complaint, pay the person money to shut-up. Having this going in the court system, probably is much cheaper for the company.
1. The Victim loose their privacy in the matter, so they may be less likely to go into the court battle.
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On the other hand, going to court means discovery, and most companies are not keen on that.
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Easy. About every Silly Con Valley company is today staffed with SJWs. Sue-happy SJWs. MS so far dodged this bullet.
In other words, they try to keep the competition's lawyers busy.
Retroactively cover Clippy abuse? (Score:1)
Why was this allowed in the first place? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why are companies allowed to prevent their employees from going to the court? Corporate law trumps state law?
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Binding arbitration is written into many employment contracts. Would this hold up in court? I don't know, I'm certainly not a lawyer. But I suspect it would have a chilling effect on an employee contemplating legal action against an employer.
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Thank you, that was informative. I looked it up a bit. So in the case of DirectTV v. Inburgia the articles make it sound like the customers could not file a suit. But upon further reading, are you saying that they could file a suit, and they could enjoin in a class action, but they would have to pay $480 to DirectTV for the privilege?
Supreme Court says binding arbitration clauses in consumer contracts trump California law [latimes.com]
Contracts requiring forced arbitration (Score:2)
Why are companies allowed to prevent their employees from going to the court? Corporate law trumps state law?
Contract law is what we are talking about and companies are forcing employees to sign forced arbitration agreements as a condition of employment. State law is typically mute on the subject so because it isn't prohibited it is permitted. Naturally forced arbitration tends to heavily favor the companies which is a huge problem. Once enough companies insist on such clauses employees don't really have the option to seek employment elsewhere under less oppressive terms.
Personally I think forced arbitration as
This is Congress, not the States. (Score:2)
Why are companies allowed to prevent their employees from going to the court? Corporate law trumps state law?
Contract law is what we are talking about and companies are forcing employees to sign forced arbitration agreements as a condition of employment. State law is typically mute on the subject so because it isn't prohibited it is permitted.
No. The problem is that Federal Law has been written by Congress to allow companies to keep claims out of court, because court is expensive and public--and to avoid subjecting claims to the whims of a jury. So almost all well-drafted consumer contracts can't be meaningfully contested in court because they usually contain arbitration clauses. Sometimes you can get out of the arbitration clauses, but usually you can't because the Federal Arbitration Act preempts state law.
corporate law (Score:1)
Re:Why was this allowed in the first place? (Score:5, Interesting)
University Law trumped state law after the Dear Colleague letter, which obligated colleges to have their own Title IX hearings where guilt was decided on a 'preponderance of evidence' rather than 'beyond a reasonable doubt' if they wanted to continue to have Federal funding.
https://www2.ed.gov/print/abou... [ed.gov]
As noted above, the Title IX regulation requires schools to provide equitable grievance procedures. As part of these procedures, schools generally conduct investigations and hearings to determine whether sexual harassment or violence occurred. In addressing complaints filed with OCR under Title IX, OCR reviews a school's procedures to determine whether the school is using a preponderance of the evidence standard to evaluate complaints. The Supreme Court has applied a preponderance of the evidence standard in civil litigation involving discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII), 42 U.S.C. SS 2000e et seq. Like Title IX,
Which led to cases like this
https://www.thefire.org/victor... [thefire.org]
In finding Warner guilty, UND used the weak "preponderance of the evidence" standard (50.01% certainty) to determine guilt or innocence-the very same standard recently imposed upon every federally funded college in the country under an April 2011 regulation from the federal Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights.
UND's reliance on the "preponderance of the evidence" standard lowered the accuracy of the proceedings so much that the police and the university arrived at very different results. Using what the university later insisted was the very same evidence, UND's campus tribunal convicted Warner of sexual assault, while the Grand Forks Police Department determined that Warner's accuser had lied about what had happened.
In fact, on May 13, 2010, the Grand Forks County District Court formally charged Warner's accuser with "False information or report to law enforcement officers or security officials," a Class A misdemeanor, and issued a warrant for her arrest on May 17, 2010. To date, Warner's accuser has failed to appear to answer the charges against her.
"When you only have to be 50.01% sure about the evidence, it's easy to make a mistake or to let bias, conscious or otherwise, determine the outcome-especially in campus justice systems. Yet, the federal government is now mandating that this flaw be enshrined at practically every university in the country," said FIRE Senior Vice President Robert Shibley.
Warner first requested a rehearing on July 28, 2010, but UND refused to grant it. In the spring of 2011, Warner asked for FIRE's help. On May 11, 2011, FIRE wrote UND President Robert O. Kelley, pointing out the university's procedural errors and criticizing its failure to reconsider the case. On May 20, UND responded to FIRE, once again denying Warner's request for a rehearing. This is when UND revealed that it had used the very same evidence to find Caleb Warner guilty of sexual assault that the police and prosecutor had used to charge his accuser with lying to law enforcement.
On July 15, an opinion column in The Wall Street Journal by FIRE Chairman Harvey A. Silverglate launched FIRE's national press campaign to encourage UND to give Warner a fair rehearing. Two weeks later, UND Provost Paul LeBel finally invited Warner to appeal the finding against him. With the help of attorney Nathan Hansen, Warner submitted a new appeal on August 31.
Late last week, Warner received a ruling from LeBel announcing that "based on the specific fact of a law enforcement office filing an affadavit of belief that the complainant had provided false information to him" about the sexual assault accusation, a "continued fin
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Why are companies allowed to prevent their employees from going to the court?
Not just employees, but customers too. [microsoft.com]
Re:Why was this allowed in the first place? (Score:5, Interesting)
No. Voluntary relationships tend to be contractual -- governed by a contract. A contract is a binding, enforceable agreement. Courts are a government service to the people, and one thing they do is enforce contracts if there's a dispute. Specific contractual actions are often beyond state law -- there's no law saying you have to perform work for Microsoft.
Arbitration agreements are an alternative to using courts. They came about because the rules for court procedures had become unduly expensive -- because court rules are controlled by lawyers, and lawyers have a financial incentive to make rules that lead to more billable hours for lawyers. Arbitration is agreed to by the parties entering into a contract containing an arbitration clause.
Arbitration is allowed by governments and courts because it resolves disputes without burdening government budgets and clogging schedules with entirely private disputes. Arbitration has court-like standards, so it more-or-less provides due process -- and if it didn't, litigants could go to court and get the contractual arbitration clause overruled.
There's various FUD about arbitration clauses -- because being mad and complaining about things you don't understand is an internet pastime for some reason -- and because lawyers want money and arbitration is a smaller payday for lawyers. But they're merely a mutually-agreed dispute resolution arrangement between the parties of a contract.
Hope that helps some people who genuinely want to understand.
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If I don't have a job, I will starve. On the other hand, most employers can easily replace most workers. I hardly see anything voluntary about this relationship. It is as voluntary as obeying a man who is pointing a gun at you.
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If I don't have a job, I will starve.
Please show evidence that anyone starved in Washington State because they lost their job any time in the last 10 years. If there’s a death certificate that says the cause was “starvation”, let’s see it. Or a news story about how someone died from starvation.
Otherwise stop lying. Thanks in advance.
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And if a business owner can't find workers, they will starve.
And most workers can easily change jobs.
The situation is symmetrical.
Somebody threatening violence against you is violating your rights. Someone not offering you a job or firing you is not violating your rights. That's the dif
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Just because you sign something does not mean it is legal. In a healthy society you can not sign away your rights.
It doesn't change your rights. You've just agreed to an alternate dispute resolution forum. If you break that agreement and go to a court, then you're going to need to explain to the court why you broke that agreement. If you have a righteous explanation, then OK. If not, then maybe don't expect the court to take your side when you can't be bothered to honor an agreement.
Where I live if there is something in a contact between employee and employer and it is not according to the intention of the law, employee wins.
Here too. Arbitration doesn't change that.
Don't pay too much attention to the FUD about it.
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It's all fine and great as long as the arbitration is not binding. If it's binding then it absolutely should not be mandatory, full stop.
They're only binding or mandatory to the extent that courts allow. Everyone involved always has the right to go to court. You better win if you do though, because if you don't, you're probably on the hook for breaking the agreement.
You should relax and stop pretending anyone's rights are changed by arbitration. They're just a cost saving mechanism and a way to avoid getting ripped off by class action lawyers.
Contract of Adhesion? (Score:2)
> No. Voluntary relationships tend to be contractual -- governed by a contract.
It's possible that most employment contracts are considered so one-sided that it's a contract of adhesion:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Lots of things are "possible". That's why we have courts and judges and juries to sort out what's actual from what's possible.
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So what you are saying is that arbitration was the governments quick and dirty answer to lawyers being the problem?
No. It's a simpler, faster, cheaper alternative to courts that non-governments use to save time and money resolving disputes.
How does its citizens feel about being given the short end of the stick with that?
Lots of different ways, but mostly no one gives a shit because they never have to use courts or arbitration to resolve a dispute. Mostly the only people who (pretend to?) care are angry people on the internet who don't understand anything about it, but they're mad and they have complaints.
What is the point of having civil courts of law, or even gov in general, when big business rules over fairness in every arbitration "agreement".
Arbitrators are impartial. That's why arbitration is allowed by courts and governments and not
How about protecting *ALL* employees? (Score:2)
I'm looking at you, government. Stop with the taxpayer funded slush funds to quiet your accusers. Let's treat every the same, regardless of their employer. What a concept!!!
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Cortana sexually harassed me (Score:3)
so i got her back, i got her back real good
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Relationships between staff have always been problematic, and relationships between managers and subordinates even more so. Many, if not most firms now, have pretty strong HR policies against any relationships involving any kind of power imbalance; the classic "executive sleeping with his secretary" scenario, because that power imbalance will always raise questions as to whether there is true consent. It's one thing to have to cubicle workers of equal standing having a relationship. While that can create so
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Now why the fuck would I want to touch such a superficial bitch with anything but a ten foot pole?
And I'm not talking about my dick.
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That's certainly a solution for you, as you sound like the emotionally stunted troglodyte who has no idea how to behave around women.
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Says the person who works around women every day and doesn't imagine that they're all out to cut off my genitals. You know, I'm an actual functional adult, not some 4chan man child
What about rights for the innocent? (Score:4, Interesting)
And protection from frivolous/false claims.
How about prohibiting making the identity of the actual person you are accusing known in public, until a court adjudicates and confirms that accusation.
It's all too easy to throw around harmful false accusations. That's probably what the arbitration agreements are intended to do --- keep harmful false accusations from being public until arbitrated and reviewed. Forced arbitration IS a legal and reasonable way of settling claims without unnecessary harm to the innocent when the accusations turn out to be clearly false.
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