Affirming a district court’s denial of a motion to compel arbitration, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has held unenforceable a provision of an employment agreement mandating that wage-and-hour claims could be brought only through individual arbitration and that employees waived “the right to participate in or receive money or any other relief from any class, collective, or representative proceeding.” The provision further provided that if the waiver provision was unenforceable, “any claim brought on a class, collective, or representative action basis must be filed in a court of competent jurisdiction.” Employees were not permitted to opt out of this provision; it was a requirement of continued employment. The Court found the waiver of collective action prohibited by the National Labor Relations Act (“NLRA”), and rejected the contention that the case involved any conflict between the NLRA and the Federal Arbitration Act (“FAA”). This decision appears to conflict with decisions of the Second, Fifth, Eighth and Ninth Circuits, laying the potential basis for the review of this issue by the Supreme Court.
The Court found that the contractual waiver of the right to proceed in a collective manner was an unlawful restriction of the exercise by the employee of the right to collective action protected by section 7 of the NLRA, a right it termed substantive and “at the heart” of the purpose of the NLRA rather than a procedural right. Addressing the employer’s contrary interpretation of section 7, the Court found persuasive interpretations of the scope of the protections of section 7 by the National Labor Relations Board, which the Court found to be “a sensible way to understand the statutory language, and thus we must follow it.”
The Court then rejected the employer’s assertion that the case involved a conflict between the NLRA, as it interpreted it, and the FAA, as interpreted by the Supreme Court. The Court reasoned that since the contractual provision at issue is unlawful under section 7 of the NLRA, “it is illegal, and meets the criteria of the FAA’s savings clause for nonenforcement.” The FAA’s savings clause provides that agreements to arbitrate “shall be valid, irrevocable, and enforceable, save upon such grounds as exist at law or in equity for the revocation of any contract.” Stating that finding the NLRA in conflict with the FAA “would render the FAA’s savings clause a nullity,” the Court rejected the contention that its decision created a Circuit split, contending that none of the opinions from the other four Circuits “has engaged substantively with the relevant arguments.” Regardless of the analytical claim, the result of the Seventh Circuit’s opinion does conflict with the result of the decisions of the other Circuits on the same issue, and accords the FAA a different role and emphasis than do the opinions of other Circuits. Lewis v. Epic Systems Corp., No. 15-2997 (7th Cir. May 26, 2016).
This post written by Rollie Goss.
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