Google Employees Visit Washington in Push to End Mandatory Arbitration for All Workers

A group of Google employees visited Capitol Hill on Thursday to support legislation to curb mandatory arbitration, which forces workers to handle employment disputes behind closed doors.

They call themselves "Googlers for Ending Forced Arbitration," and they just came off a big victory in Silicon Valley. The group succeeded in getting Google to stop requiring its full-time employees to sign arbitration clauses. Now, they're trying to build on that momentum to end the practice for all workers.

The group went to Washington to present a bill co-sponsored by Bay Area congresswoman Jackie Speier. It aims to end forced arbitration for workers of all types in all industries.

This tech worker movement to end mandatory arbitration started with a protest against sexual harassment at Google.

Tens of thousands of Google workers walked out last November, saying mandatory arbitration was silencing workers, especially around instances of sexual harassment.

"We demand structural change in the name of transparency, accountability and equity," said Google employee Celie O’Neil-Hart, who spoke at the protest. "We demand an end to forced arbitration."

Mandatory arbitration clauses force workers to settle disputes with their employer not in court, but behind closed doors with a company-appointed moderator. That means cases of sexual harassment, wage theft and discrimination may never become public the way they might in a court hearing.

“What we really object to is this idea that you as an employee don’t have a choice in how you access justice," said Tanuja Gupta, one of the Google employees visiting Washington.

Google did not respond to request for comment on this story.

Christine Hines, legislative director for the National Association of Consumer Advocates, said settling employee matters behind closed doors makes it harder to learn what’s going on inside corporations.

"It not only hurts their workers," Hines said, "it hurts society at large, that we don’t know about the systemic misconduct of the corporation."

Hines pointed out that mandatory arbitration was not originally intended for workers. When the Federal Arbitration Act was enacted in 1925, it was used by corporations to resolve contract disputes. The idea was that companies could go to arbitration instead of suing and heading to court every time they had a disagreement.

But starting in the 1980s, a series of Supreme Court cases expanded mandatory arbitration. They made it legal for corporations to have consumers and workers sign away their right to go to court. In the last decade, court decisions have gone further, making it so that mandatory arbitration clauses can now have workers and consumers waive their right to participate in class-action lawsuits.

Sanjukta Paul, a law professor at Wayne State University, said that for workers, mandatory arbitration is a really new thing.

In the early 1990s, a small percentage of workers had these clauses in their contracts. By the early 2000s that number was up to a quarter of all U.S. workers. Today, over half of the nation's workforce signs away their rights to courts.

Paul said mandatory arbitration has become “a condition of working and therefore a condition of making a living. The more that this becomes the standard industry practice, the more you don’t really have a choice to avoid it.”

The push to end mandatory arbitration at Google is part of a growing culture of activism among tech workers. Ever since the 2016 election, tech workers have become more outspoken politically, especially around how their companies are being run and what they are building.

Under pressure from employees, companies like Adobe, Intuit and now Google have ended mandatory arbitration for full-time employees. But over half of Google’s workers are contractors — and they still have mandatory arbitration in their contracts.

One contract worker, who doesn’t want to use her name for fear of reprisal, showed me the part of her contract that deals with mandatory arbitration. In the seven-page document, it was the only part that was in bold and in all caps. Here’s what it says:

In consideration of my assignment with Google and its promise to arbitrate all disputes, I agree that, except as provided below, Google and I waive any right to a judge or jury trial in any dispute.

Her contract is with a third-party staffing company, even though she works at Google. At this point Google is not requiring those staffing companies to remove the mandatory arbitration clause from their contracts.

The worker said she’s happy that full-time employees at Google are no longer forced into arbitration, but she’d like to see the same change applied to contractors.

If the Googlers for Ending Forced Arbitration get what they want, then employees and contractors in all industries will no longer be subject to mandatory arbitration.