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Comment by gdulli | Hacker News Reader

> There’s still some missing pieces of the motivation puzzle missing here, such as why this issue, why this point in time,

That part is the easy part to understand. The employer acted in a manner that made employees want to sue. They realized the fine print they hadn't read when joining the company gave away that right. What's happening now is about drawing attention to this so that future prospective employees elsewhere are aware of it and there's pressure on companies to stop requiring it.

That's the explicit point of protest, I don't understand why you'd characterize it as a PR stunt.

Or why you'd preface your statement with a dramatic disclaimer about cynicism that makes the thing you're portraying sound more sinister.

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That story is nice and it’s plausible. It’s also subtlety different from the story told by the article.

For instance, nobody admitted they didn’t read the fine print or objected at the time, or anything like that. In light of that, my story that “some employees had a change of heart about their contracts and took up activism” would be just as valid. You might not care about that distinction, but it puts the events in a slightly different light from the other explanation about “employees don’t have leverage when they were being hired”.

And yeah, your story would also make sense if this was a play about taking the power back over their own contracts. But considering that they are still striking over existing employee contracts would contradict your story.

Since I’m being downvoted anyway, fuck it. I think these employees are being duplicitous or at least misleading about their intentions. I think their activism has overridden any ideals they might have had about negotiating power. And I think “forced arbitration” is not worthy of moral condemnation. You are free to tell me all the ways those are terribly wrong ways to think.

this is a very interesting theory you've built for yourself: The Riot employees say they want to end forced arbitration so they are taking a public action to bring collective pressure to bear on management and you seem to thing that this is some sort of sham and they're actually taking a public action just to bring collective pressure to bear on management because they want to end forced arbitration

I don't even understand which two things you're trying to distinguish. Or where duplicity comes in. The narrative of the employees understanding too late about the rights they gave up, and then protesting, is straightforward.

I doubt the employees had ever given any thought to it, or were even aware of it, until they had a reason to look into lawsuits.

Arbitration is neither objectively worthy nor unworthy of moral condemnation. It's on them and on you to try to make your cases and influence opinion.

Like many things arbitration is probably fine in principle if treated by both parties in the spirit in which it was originally conceived. To simplify legal matters. But if it gets abused and used as a license to misbehave by one party then it should be rethought.

Maybe that's what happened here and maybe not, I don't know. But the positions and intentions seem straightforward.

> And I think “forced arbitration” is not worthy of moral condemnation. You are free to tell me all the ways those are terribly wrong ways to think.

Sure. Your way of thinking means that employees and execs can sexually harass people, and get away with it, without allowing the victim to achieve justice.

It allows companies to protect sexual harassers, all while being completely immune to the legal system, and making it extremely difficult for victims to hold companies responsible for protecting sexual harassers.

Personally, I'd rather live in a world where it was possible to sue companies for protecting sexual harassers, and for retaliating against victims, through our court system.

The whole point of our court system is to support the law. I don't like it when people's legal rights to justice are taken away from them, for the purpose of protecting sexual harassers.

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