
Ask HN: Employer is trying to add forced arbitration to my contract. What to do? - PurpleStart
When I joined my current company, I signed a relatively reasonable employment agreement compared to the rest of the industry — no forced arbitration, reasonable bounds on assignment of inventions.<p>Now my company has “updated” the employee agreement to include forced arbitration (excluding cases of sexual harassment and assault) and giving current employees the ability to explicitly opt out of the new clause.<p>What should I do? Is there any advantage to signing this? Can they do anything to me if I opt out?
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tomohawk
First course of action: ignore it. Just because someone gives you a piece of
paper to sign, doesn't mean you have to sign it. Don't make an issue of it.
Just don't sign it until they make an issue. This worked for me at one
company.

Second course of action, get some legal advice from a lawyer in your area who
knows employment law. Based on that info, seek to ammend the contract to be
more reasonable. The lawyer may say that such contracts are void in your
state, in which case just sign it. In other cases, the lawyer may give you
some reasonable things to talk to your employer about.

Oftentimes, companies get bad advice from lawyers who give them boilerplate
contracts to use. Sometimes if you explain how this impacts you, they will
change it. If they see it puts them at a disadvantage, for example.

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howard941
Too much of your question is based on where you're employed. If for ex you
were employed in Florida by a company based in Florida then your employment is
at whim and they can let you go for opting out or for any reason that strikes
the employer's fancy other than for certain types of invidious discriminatory
reasons ("old" age, sex, race, veteran status, some disabilities, etc)

