Other Advocacy

Lawyers’ Committee Joins Other Advocacy Groups in Filing Amicus Brief with National Labor Relations Board

On July 27, 2011, the Lawyers Committee joined with 26 advocacy groups in filing a friend-of-the-court brief with the National Labor Relations Board in the case of D.R. Horton, Inc. v. Cuda. The brief argues that an employer’s imposition of a contractual provision prohibiting employees from pursuing workplace-related claims as collective actions or class actions violates the right of employees to engage in concerted activity with other employees, a right guaranteed by the National Labor Relations Act of 1937 (NLRA). Numerous decisions of the National Labor Relations Board over decades have held that pursuing a legal claim in cooperation with other similarly situated employees is “concerted activity” protected by the NLRA. The brief also argues that there is nothing in the Federal Arbitration Act of 1925 permitting employers to use arbitration agreements to deprive workers of their rights under the NLRA to pursue their claims through collective action. Collective action is important to permit employees to pursue claims where the amounts of individual damages are too small to justify an individual lawsuit and/or when patterns of unlawful discrimination cannot be revealed through suits by individual employees. Collective actions also provide greater protection to employees from the risk of retaliation for their complaints of unlawful treatment. Horton argues that the recent Supreme Court ruling in AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion guarantees employers the right to require arbitration of all disputes with employees and to require that employees waive the right to have the similar claims of many employees heard together. This friend-of-the-court brief argues that the Concepcion decision involved consumer rights rather than employee rights and involved state law protections rather than rights protected by federal law, and therefore has no bearing on the ability of an employer to impose arbitration when this deprives employees of the substantive right to concerted activity that is guaranteed by a federal statute, the NLRA. If the National Labor Relations Board agrees with the amici that a forced waiver of collective actions or class actions violates rights provided by the NLRA, employers will not be able to require employees to waive the right class actions to enforce federal anti-discrimination laws, though employers could probably require that such class actions be presented to arbitrators rather than in court. To read the brief filed by the 27 advocacy groups, please click here. The United States Department of Labor and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission have also filed a brief taking a position similar to the brief joined by the Lawyers’ Committee.

EPA Murals 

Each day hundreds of EPA employees whose offices are in the Ariel Rios Building in Washington D.C. are confronted by depictions of American Indians as savages, murderers, and sexual predators.

For more information on the commissioning of these murals by the government and the artists please click here.

To read articles on the murals please click here.

For links to the agencies and some of the organizations involved in this issue please click here.