Neil Gorsuch's first major opinion is a decision allowing bosses to steal wages from their workers

[turbinetree]

Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee is exactly who you think he is.

IAN MILLHISER MAY 21, 2018, 11:01 AM

The Supreme Court held on Monday that employers can force their employees to sign away many of their rights to sue their employers. As a practical matter, Monday’s decision in Epic Systems v. Lewis will enable employers to engage in small-scale wage theft with impunity, so long as they spread the impact of this theft among many employees.

Neil Gorsuch, who occupies the seat that Senate Republicans held open for a year until Donald Trump could fill it, wrote the Court’s 5-4 decision. The Court split along party lines.

Epic Systems involves three consolidated cases, each involving employment contracts cutting off employees’ rights to sue their employer in a court of law. In at least one of these cases, the employees were required to sign away these rights as a condition of starting their job. In another, existing workers were told to sign away their rights if they wanted to keep working.

Each contract contained two provisions, a “forced arbitration” provision, which requires legal disputes between the employer and the employee to be resolved by a private arbitrator and not by a real court; and a provision prohibiting employees from bringing class actions against the employer.

Writing with his trademarked smugness, Gorsuch presents Epic Systems as a simple application of a legal text. “The parties before us contracted for arbitration,” he writes. “They proceeded to specify the rules that would govern their arbitrations, indicating their intention to use individualized rather than class or collective action procedures. And this much the Arbitration Act seems to protect pretty absolutely.”

It’s the sort of statement someone might write if they’d never read the Federal Arbitration Act — the law at the heart of this case — and had only read the Supreme Court’s decisions expanding that act’s scope.

https://thinkprogress.org/neil-gorsuch-to-allow-bosses-to-steal-wages-from-workers-a0f2171a257f/


I hate being blackmailed to get a job...................and this "decision" basically is blackmailing employees or individuals looking for work.

Maybe Gorsuch and other right wingers should revisit the Constitution where it says that citizens have a right to sue, and have there day in a court, this ruling eviscerates that part of the Constitution...............

[lame54]

1. Shocked. Shocked I tell you

[mvd]

2. A stolen seat

And Gorsuch has been every bit as bad as I thought. I like to call him Gorsuck. I could see the snake in him as much as he tried to hide it. Just had to read about his rulings.

[Eliot Rosewater]

3. GOP hates working people. It is that simple. But many working people simply

value racism over economics.

Thus the reason I NEVER want to hear that they are equal or economic inequality is the main problem.

[Sophia4]

4. A Democratic Congress should insure that we all get our right to a public trial

and end the Arbitration Act.

[edhopper]

5. Why on earth

do working people vote GOP?

Can't they connect the dolts?

[Elwood P Dowd]

6. Because the media, and sometimes Dem politicians, do a terrible job

of informing working people about who keeps picking their pockets.

[smirkymonkey]

8. It never ceases to amaze me.

I will never understand them as long as I live.

[Rainbow Droid]

7. "pretty absolutely" a legitimate legal scholar and not at all an incompetent criminal bootlick.