
Over 100 Riot Games Employees Walked Out to End Forced Arbitration - smacktoward
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/evyz7p/over-100-riot-games-employees-walked-out-today-to-end-forced-arbitration
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0x70dd
Is there an upside of arbitration for employees? From what I read it's mostly
for the benefit of the company. How is it even legal to forcefully take away
the right of settling matters in court?

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aeternus
The upside is lower cost for both parties. Courts mostly require a lawyer to
successfully navigate.

The goal of civil court is to enforce contracts. If both parties agree via a
contract to solve any disagreements with 3rd party arbitration, why wouldn't
that be legal?

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Tostino
Generally employer / employee relationship, the employer has vastly more
bargaining power. Obviously this is no absolution, but I wouldn't say that
forced arbitration is a fair practice under those circumstances is fair
practice.

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nwsm
At first I thought the title meant that Riot "walked them out" ie fired them
and walked them out of the building on the spot.

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danbrooks
It's nice to see a civil protest. Both sides seemed interested in compromise
and moving the company forward.

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theaustinseven
Really? It looks more like Riot is doing the absolute minimum to make it look
like they are actually interested. They won't get rid of forced arbitration
for current or past employees, and new employees only get to opt out(I wonder
how many hoops they'll have to jump through for that). Current employees can't
even opt out at this point.

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Avshalom
They don't even get to actually opt out, just "for individual sexual
harassment and sexual assault claims"; the qualifier "individual" is probably
doing a lot of heavy lifting too.

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unseenbastiat
Let me get this straight:

Potential hires were offered an employment contract with terms that included
the settling certain disputes through arbitration. They accepted the offer and
signed the contract. Now these people are not only are trying to nullify that
clause, they’re adopting an air of moral superiority because they think that
clause should never have existed.

Not only does this seem unsympathetic to me, it seems impractical. Why would
you go work for a company that seemingly doesn’t share your values only to
later take an activist stance to try and change said company?

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harimau777
There is often a significant power difference between an employer and someone
seeking employment. Once the seeker becomes the employee they have more power
and can band with other employees to pool their power. Therefore, there's not
a particularly realistic way for someone to negotiate these sorts of things
before they are hired.

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unseenbastiat
Sure. There’s still some missing pieces of the motivation puzzle missing here,
such as why this issue, why this point in time, why don’t employees exercise
this option more often if this is a legit negotiating tactic, etc.

At the risk of being cynical, my guess is that this is a PR stunt as much as
it’s an employment negotiation. We the outside observers would be the pawns of
this tactic that can produce public sentiment to influence Riot. That’s why
I’m not so quick to categorize this as simply another contract negotiation.

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tomnipotent
> There’s still some missing pieces of the motivation puzzle missing here

No there's not, you just haven't bothered to read up on the issue.

Rioters wanted a toxic senior leader fired for well-documented lapses in
judgement. Instead he was given 3 months off and re-hired when the dust
settled. The employees personally impacted by this are unable to pursue legal
recourse thanks to forced arbitration.

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unseenbastiat
If you take what people say at face value, then sure, the issue is simple. I
think that’s an unwise presumption to always make, but YMMV.

But even assuming your explanation is correct, it is incomplete. Why now? This
guy has been with the company for a while. He is hardly the only bad actor at
the company, so why does his case merit more focus? Have a confluence of
factors reached a tipping point? Do employees feel secure enough about their
status that they can make this move?

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CydeWeys
I don't understand the argument you're trying to make. The summary of it seems
to be "Lots of bad things are happening, so why try to do anything about a
particular bad thing?" The answer is because that's how you solve problems.
You tackle one subproblem, then move on to the next, and continue until no
subproblems remain.

The employees are fighting this particular case of injustice because they care
about doing so, and because you don't solve a big problem by doing nothing;
you have to start somewhere! This is the start.

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fallingfrog
Give’m hell! That’s how you get things done.

