The landmark law giving workers the right to organize doesn’t include the right to collectively seek legal redress, the Supreme Court ruled.
Justices said employers can force their workers to adjudicate claims on an individual basis through private arbitration, in a 5-4 decision issued on Monday.
The dispute was centered around whether the National Labor Relations Act guarantees the right of collective legal action. The conservative majority ruled that it does not; and that workplace contracts mandating individualized private dispute settlement are permitted under the Federal Arbitration Act. Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the opinion on behalf of the Court.
“The NLRA secures to employees rights to organize unions and bargain collectively, but it says nothing about how judges and arbitrators must try legal disputes that leave the workplace and enter the courtroom or arbitral forum,” said Gorsuch.
Those challenging mandatory arbitration clauses had pointed to Section 7 of the NLRA, which gives employees the right to engage in “concerted activities for the purpose of…mutual aid or protection.” Gorsuch dismissed “concerted activities” as a “catchall term.”
“[T]he term appears at the end of a detailed list of activities speaking of ‘self-organization,’” he said. “And where, as here, a more general term follows more specific terms in a list, the general term is usually understood to ’embrace only objects similar in nature to those objects enumerated by the preceding specific words.’”
Writing for the minority, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg characterized this analysis as poorly-formed and pedantic. She said Gorsuch was misapplying legal theory on interpreting vague statutes “to undermine Congress’ efforts to draft encompassing legislation.”
“Nothing suggests that Congress envisioned a cramped construction of the NLRA,” she said.
Ginsburg noted that courts have previously protected certain collective actions not enumerated in the law.
“For example, the Board and federal courts have affirmed that the Act shields employees from employer interference when they participate in concerted appeals to the media,” she said.
In her analysis, Ginsburg also warned that the majority was risking the return of pre-NLRA “yellow dog” contracts, with its narrow ruling on the definition of concerted activities.
“Such agreements, which employers required employees to sign as a condition of employment, typically commanded employees to abstain from joining labor unions,” she explained.
