Blogs

NELA Blows The Whistle On General Mills -- Efforts Responsible For Significant Progress In Movement To End Forced Arbitration As many of you are aware, there has been a trifecta of bad corporate behavior toward employees and consumers. The Oakland Raiders’ motion to compel arbitration in the case Lacy T. v. Oakland Raiders provided a national platform to educate America’s workers on what is happening to their employment and civil rights as a result of forced arbitration. NELA led the charge on that as we worked with Lacy T.’s counsel, sending her attorneys’ and NELA’s statements to hundreds of major media outlets. This produced a flurry of social ...

On Wednesday, August 8, 2012, NELA and The Institute partnered with a group of public interest organizations and law firms to present “Forced Arbitration: Where Workers Stand Today.” The brown-bag lunch program was moderated by Rebecca M. Hamburg Cappy, Program Director for both NELA and The Institute, and featured presentations from Leslie Bailey (Staff Attorney – Public Justice), Cliff Palefsky (McGuinn, Hillsman and Palefsky), and Cynthia Rice (Director of Litigation Advocacy and Training – California Rural Legal Assistance). The attendees, who crowded into a conference room at the offices of Lieff Cabraser Hiemann & Bernstein in San Francisco, were ...

On May 18, 2012, NELA, its public interest organization, The Employee Rights Advocacy Institute For Law & Policy, and the National Employment Law Project (NELP), filed an amicus brief urging the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit to affirm the district court’s rejection of a collective action ban in an arbitration agreement. In Sutherland v. Ernst & Young, LLP , Judge Kimba Wood of the Southern District of New York held that Ernst & Young’s prohibition of class and collective actions precludes employees from effectively vindicating their statutory rights under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). This is the second case involving collective ...