Free Republic

A judge ruled on Friday that several former Twitter employees who had filed a class action lawsuit against the social media giant must pursue individual arbitration instead. The case involved five former Twitter employees involved in a class action against Twitter for not being given adequate notice before being laid off. U.S. District judge James Donato ruled that the five former employees must pursue individual arbitration because of the arbitration agreement they had signed with Twitter.

Lawyers and a Silicon Valley start-up have found ways to flood the system with claims, so companies are looking to thwart a process they created. Teel Lidow couldn’t quite believe the numbers. Over the past few years, the nation’s largest telecom companies, like Comcast and AT&T, have had a combined 330 million customers. Yet annually an average of just 30 people took the companies to arbitration, the forum where millions of Americans are forced to hash out legal disputes with corporations.Mr. Lidow, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur with a law degree, figured there had to be more people upset with their...

Libel: While scores of Americans and national security analysts believe that fired White House aide Omarosa Manigault-Newman ought to be charged for recording Chief of Staff John Kelly as he let her go earlier this year, the Trump campaign isn’t waiting for the Deep State to do the right thing. The campaign filed for an arbitration hearing against Manigault-Newman on Tuesday that could cost her millions in damages over allegations she violated the terms of her non-disclosure agreement that she signed in 2016 when she was hired.

Clark County School District educators have won an arbitration over their 2017-2018 contract that will provide increases in pay and health care contributions. The district says the estimated $52 million deal could cause another major budget shortfall. Teachers will move a step in the salary schedule effective June 1, 2018. The district’s contributions to health care through the Teachers Health Trust also will increase from roughly $538 to $583 a month. That increase will be retroactive to July 1, 2017.

Briony Whitehouse was a 19-year-old intern in 2003 when she boarded an elevator in the Russell Senate Office Building with a Republican senator who, she said, groped her until the doors reopened. She never reported the incident to her bosses for fear of jeopardizing her career. But she recently tweeted about her experience on Twitter as part of the #MeToo campaign, a social-media phenomenon that has aired thousands of complaints about sexual harassment. Some of the accounts have called out by name Hollywood moguls, media stars, even a former U.S. president. Other women such as Whitehouse have stopped short of...

Mr. Oliveira brought a putative class action suit against the interstate trucking company for which he worked–Prime–for violating the Fair Labor Standards Act, Missouri minimum wage statute, and other labor laws. Prime moved to compel arbitration under the FAA. In response, Plaintiffs argued that the FAA had no application to their contracts because they are transportation workers. [The Court agreed with the Truckers]

General Mills is scrapping a controversial plan to strip consumers of their right to sue the food company. The company, which owns Cheerios, Progresso and Yoplait, had posted a notice on its website notifying visitors of a change to its legal terms—visitors using its websites or engaging with it online in a variety of other ways meant they would have to give up their right to sue. Instead, the new terms said, people would need to have disputes resolved through informal negotiation or arbitration. …

Here’s what Wisconsin’s legal system and its teachers unions have just taught the nation: If you’re a teacher and you get fired for looking at porn at work, you’ll get your job back. Such is the case of Andrew Harris, former seventh-grade science teacher at Glacier Creek Middle School in the Middleton-Cross Plains Area School District. The district’s school board Monday voted in a special closed session to comply with an arbitrator’s 60-page order that demands Harris be reinstated. He was fired in 2010 after receiving and viewing multiple pornographic and sexually inappropriate images and videos, according to a complaint....

LAS VEGAS (AP) - A Las Vegas high school teacher who recently won his job back in arbitration after he was fired several years ago has been suspended. The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports 54-year-old John Mannion was sent home from Bonanza High School on Friday after officials learned he faces felony drug trafficking charges. He was arrested last July on suspicion of selling the prescription painkiller Oxycontin to an undercover detective.

<p>Chrysler workers who were fired or suspended two years ago after a MyFoxDetroit investigation found them drinking and goofing off during lunch break are back on the job. MyFoxDetroit first aired the footage of the Chrysler workers in September 2010.</p>

A city police officer charged last year with stealing more than $300 worth of Harry Potter merchandise from Universal Studios Florida returned to the force Friday, after completing a diversion program for first-time offenders. As part of an arbitration panel's 2-1 vote to reinstate him, Officer Henry A. Rogowski, 50, will not receive back-pay and will be monitored through the city's Track 3 program for rehabilitation, police union attorney Bryan Campbell confirmed. Assigned to the warrant office, Officer Rogowski risks termination if he receives discipline within a two-year probation period.

The spread of Sharia Law to the entire world is part of jihad. In Canada and Britain, jihad is advancing. A June 2010 report entitled "Sharia Law in Britain: A Threat to One Law for All and Equal Rights" begins with Secretary General of the Islamic Sharia Council Suhaib Hasan saying, "If Sharia law is implemented, then you can turn this country [Great Britain] into a haven of peace because once a thief's hand is cut off nobody is going to steal." Furthermore, "once just only once, if an adulterer is stoned nobody is going to commit this crime at...

Chrysler Group made the wrong choice in deciding to keep open one New York state dealership and reject another, said an arbitrator who relied on performance data for both stores. The arbitration for Terry Chrysler-Jeep in Burnt Hills, N.Y., may be the first in which comparative operating data, including sales, was used, said the Terry dealership's lawyer, John Gentile. The data were unsealed last month by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Arthur Gonzalez. However, it won't be the last such case, as Gentile's law firm in Mineola, N.Y., plans to introduce performance figures for its clients and their competitors in two other...

SAN FRANCISCO (Legal Newsline)-Arbitration could be on its way to becoming a more expensive venue for resolving consumer disputes, California Supreme Court Justice Carlos Moreno told Legal Newsline.

Sometimes the dems know no bottom to the cesspool within which they live. Franken offers an amendment to the Defense appropriations bill. It stems from the awful case of Jamie Leigh Jones who was allegedly sexually abused while working for contractor Halliburton/KBR in Iraq.

For arbitration’s opponents, ensuring that consumers can go to court is not the end goal. It is actually the first step of a two-step dance at the plaintiffs’ lawyer prom. The second step is to allow these consumer cases to become large class actions—the kind that are famous for making a relatively few plaintiffs’ lawyers rich while giving the consumer masses pennies on the dollar, or even coupons, for their trouble.

VIDEO HERE.

Thirty percent (30%) of Americans say it is fair to form a union without having a secret ballot vote if a majority of a company’s workers sign a card saying they want to unionize. But a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 52% of adults do not believe it is fair to form a union without a secret vote. Eighteen percent (18%) are not sure. Sixty-five percent (65%) of Republicans believe it’s unfair to establish a union without a secret ballot. Democrats and adults not affiliated with either party are more closely divided, although pluralities of both groups...

[T]he unions may have a fallback position [on card check]: Forget about the secret ballot, and try to pass a bill with mandatory federal arbitration. This might be easier to defend. Every American knows what the secret ballot is; few Americans know what mandatory arbitration means. Mandatory arbitration would be a major, massive change in American labor law. Currently, unions are free to strike, but employers are free to resist their demands as long as they want. The card check bill would require, after only 120 days of bargaining, a federal arbitrator to step in and impose a settlement. A...

Whether the misleadingly named Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA)--known as "card check"--is introduced next week or next year, it remains the central political objective of organized labor. It was also championed as a domestic priority by President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats during the 2008 campaign. The EFCA would undercut the idea of a secret ballot in unionization drives and guarantee mandatory arbitration of many initial collective bargaining agreements. Canada's experience with card check illustrates how it could further hobble the U.S. economy.Card check would replace the government-monitored secret ballot election procedure, the cornerstone of federal labor law since the...