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Comment by TAForObvReasons | Hacker News Reader

HR exists to protect the company, full stop. They are only interested in the workers insofar as they reveal potential legal liabilities for the company.

It is almost always better to first talk to outside legal representation to understand the landscape. If there are actual law violations, they will help properly document and possibly start preparing a case, and if not then you know you should prepare to leave the company.

EDIT: surprised at the downvotes here, this is common knowledge for workers in all industries, not just tech, and this has been discussed at length every time a similar issue arises.

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> It is almost always better to first talk to outside legal representation to understand the landscape. If there are actual law violations, they will help properly document and possibly start preparing a case, and if not then you know you should prepare to leave the company.

Assuming you have already agreed to legally binding arbitration as is pretty much standard in all employee contracts (although thankfully a recent law banned this practice in California for employees hired in 2019 or later), how useful is it to go to a lawyer? It just seems like the system is designed to work against you.

I have never actually gone through the binding arbitration process, so my knowledge of this is very limited.

All you said is correct about arbitration. However, It never hurts to get independent legal advice. You never know like if the arbitration clause won't hold or if there are other aspects you're missing. Also, last but not least AFAIK you can and should always bring your own lawyer in arbitration.

In many states that permit binding arbitration agreements, whistleblower protections and criminal activity reports pierce the agreement. That's why the specific nature of the transgression is important, and why actually talking to a lawyer is better.

It is the reverse. The state must not "permit" so much as aggressively work around mandatory binding arbitration, as the judiciary viciously denies access to courts of law to victims of mandatory binding arbitration and invalidates state laws to protect their citizenry. The American Arbitration Act has been interpreted with maximal denial of the rule of law towards its victims.

> how useful is it to go to a lawyer?

If nothing else, an informed, independent perspective should be able to help you better understand your situation, or see/know to ask about factors which you might not.

> Assuming you have already agreed to legally binding arbitration as is pretty much standard in all employee contracts (although thankfully a recent law banned this practice in California for employees hired in 2019 or later), how useful is it to go to a lawyer? It just seems like the system is designed to work against you.

State laws trump agreements one makes with a company.

> this has been discussed at length every time a similar issue arises

That's probably why it was downvoted. Repetition is tedious, and HN is for curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

With all due respect, discussions about legal matters should never be trivialized or considered "tedious".

HN is not a site for discussing legal matters per se, but only the ones that gratify intellectual curiosity, and only to the extent that they do. That is what we're optimizing for here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Yeah, that appears to be the "Hacker News wisdom" on this topic and it certainly seems plausible to me. I was just wondering if this is a basically universally held opinion, or if some people with relevant experience have a different view.

While that may be "HN Wisdom", when it comes to these sentences, "HR exists to protect the company, full stop. They are only interested in the workers insofar as they reveal potential legal liabilities for the company.", I usually see HN folk only think about the first sentence and forget about the second one.

That is, often times an employee and the company share a mutual interest because of the risk of liability, and it's good to understand this, because as an employee this can help you. As jedberg said in a comment above, this is one reason maybe while going to a third party (e.g. complaining to someone else, who then brings that to HR) can help. In that case, it's not so much "you vs. your adversary", but both the person reporting to HR and HR itself share the viewpoint of "If we don't stop this person he could get us sued."

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