Over 17 long years — starting long before the #MeToo movement galvanized the nation — one of the most powerful banks in the country has been able to keep the lid on many embarrassing details of a high-profile under discrimination case. A day of reckoning could be on the horizon, though, with a recent agreement between Goldman Sachs and a group of women suing the firm in that case to unseal their allegations of harassment and discrimination. I wrote about the case today for Capital & Main.
More than 60 million U.S. workers have no choice but to use closed-door arbitration — instead of the public courts — if they have a dispute with their employer. I looked into the ways that so-called “forced arbitration” harms low-wage workers who are seeking justice. Here’s my article today in Capital & Main.
Goldman Sachs & Co. is among the 50+ percent of U.S. companies that have forced employees into contracts that require them to use closed-door arbitration — not the public courts — in the event of a dispute. So-called “mandatory arbitration” is one of the greatest scams ever by Corporate America and helps keep racists, sexual harassers and other miscreant bosses out of the headlines and entrenched in their jobs.
So it shouldn’t have come as a huge surprise when, earlier this week, Goldman said it had hired a law firm to review the impact of mandatory arbitration on its employees and that arbitration was working just fine! Which indeed it is, for Goldman. What was a surprise was news that the law firm that did the review was the same one that sexual predatorJeffrey Epstein used. I wrote about it today in The American Prospect.
Financial regulators are treading into matters related to environment, social and governance, or ESG, at an unprecedented pace. But with conservative opponents pushing back, it isn’t clear how far regulators can go. You can learn more in my article today for Capital & Main.
Wall Street firms have been rushing to making commitments to racial justice since the death of George Floyd, but how do the same firms behave when a Black employee comes forward to complain about racism? The answer is discouraging. Black people who complain have been ostracized, harassed, threatened and fired after speaking up. And when they have their cases heard in Wall Street’s private arbitration forum, they lose almost all of the time. I wrote about these issues in an article for The Nation, published today.
You can read it here.
Twenty-five years ago this month, three women at a Long Island branch of financial industry giant Smith Barney filed an explosive class-action sexual harassment lawsuit. Their complaint described a branch office where it was acceptable for men to refer to their female colleagues as “b*tches” and “c*nts”, where the boss bellowed to the troops at an office Christmas party that the branch was “the biggest whorehouse in Garden City” and where male brokers would assemble in a basement party room dubbed “the Boom Boom Room” to drink, party and engage in vulgar talk.
That suit wound up including 22,000 women by the time it settled, and women at other brokerage firms started speaking up, too, adding up to a public relations nightmare for the brokerage industry.
A quarter-century later, there is change, but women are still struggling. I wrote about it in an opinion piece today for CNN. You can read it here.
In today’s forced arbitration world, plaintiffs’ lawyers can’t make any money on a $500 rip-off complaint from a single consumer or a one-off $1,000 wage and hour claim. Banning access to the courts for individual matters — while barring group claims even in arbitration — is a near-guarantee that sleazy operators won’t be held accountable.
Until now. Lawyers whose cases hit a dead-end when companies began banning class actions are using advertising, social media, and word-of-mouth among employees to track down plaintiffs and file mass arbitrations. That means that, these days, exploited employees with very similar cases can turn the arbitration game against employers. I wrote about one such case against the food delivery service DoorDash for The American Prospect. You can read it here.
A number of companies that sell liability insurance to cover sexual harassment are demanding higher deductibles or restricting coverage for businesses in high-risk industries such as entertainment, a new survey shows. I wrote about it today for CNBC.com.
A year ago, insurers were getting concerned about the risks they were taking on when they wrote these policies, but their anxiety has risen over the past year. This is the story I wrote about the 2018 survey for theintercept.com.