Workforce Bulletin

In May, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis that employers may lawfully require employees to sign arbitration agreements that include a waiver of the right to participate in an employee class action lawsuit or arbitration. Below, we discuss the significance of this decision and highlight issues that employers may wish to consider in the wake of it.

Epic Systems—a Pivotal Win for Employers

The NLRB planted the seed for Epic Systems in 2012, when it first took the position that Section 7 of the National Labor relations Act (“NLRA”)—which affords employees ...

When the Supreme Court held in American Express Co. v. Italian Colors Restaurant, 133 S. Ct. 2304 (2013),  that the Federal Arbitration Act does not permit courts to invalidate a contractual waiver of class arbitration on the ground that the plaintiff’s cost of individually arbitrating a federal statutory claim exceeds the potential recovery, many employers in the financial services industry, if they had not done so already, strengthened the language of  their mandatory arbitration provisions and policies to include explicit class action and class arbitration waivers.  ...

On Epstein Becker Green’s Management Memo blog, our colleague Jill Barbarino reviews the National Labor Relations Board’s ruling in Murphy Oil that revisited and reaffirmed its position that employers violate the National Labor Relations Act by requiring employees covered by the Act (virtually all non-supervisory and non-managerial employees of most private sector employees, whether unionized or not) to waive, as a condition of their employment, participation in class or collective actions despite rejection by federal courts.

Click here to read the Management memo blog ...

By:  John F. Fullerton III

The Second Circuit has given class action waivers another shot in the arm.  In Parisi v. Goldman, Sachs & Co. (pdf), plaintiff argued that because she had agreed to arbitrate statutory employment discrimination claims against her employer, but could not proceed in a class-wide arbitration, she must be permitted to pursue her Title VII pattern-or-practice sex discrimination claim as a class action plaintiff in court; otherwise, her arbitration agreement would constitute an impermissible waiver of a substantive statutory right.   The Court firmly ...