Starting in 2020, employers in California are banned from requiring employees to agree to arbitration of state discrimination and labor law issues. That's good news for employees, maybe. And it may have an impact beyond California.
Arbitrations are bad for a number of reasons when done as mandatory processes rather than truly voluntary. Employees have been pushing back on mandatory arbitration, sometimes successfully. So this law will hopefully prevent abusive forced arbitrations in California.
This could affect employees beyond California if they work for a company with offices in California. Many will simply drop forced arbitration across the board.
I say maybe it's good for employees because there's still the Federal Arbitration Act to deal with. Employers will argue that this California law is preempted by the FAA, which allows abusive forced arbitration. I'm guessing we'll see litigation about this soon.
We need action in other states, and we need action on the federal level to ban abusive forced arbitrations. Arbitration can be a wonderful thing if truly voluntary and truly fair. We need to make sure that all employees get to make a real choice rather than being forced into an unfair process.
C'mon Florida. Let's do something to help employees for a change.
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I appreciate your comments and general questions but this isn't the place to ask confidential legal questions. If you need an employee-side employment lawyer, try http://exchange.nela.org/findalawyer to locate one in your state.