The Fat Lady Hasn't Sung Yet on Epic Systems v Lewis

I just saw this: Dems Stake Out Their Turf With Bill Targeting Epic Systems. Law360 reports that Representatives from New York and Virginia have introduced a bill (H.R 7109)in Congress that would ban class action waiver provisions and requirements to settle disputes only by arbitration in employment contracts. The Senate is working on a similar bill, according to the article, but doesn't have any information on that.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

The Supreme Court Case and What It Means to You

Opening act: I've recently been getting a lot of questions about the blacklist (see previous posts here and here). I have it documented somewhere that if you leave within 90 days after a go-live, you're blacklisted. The current concerns are around when you can leave during implementation. For example, for an 18 month project with Epic involvement, if customer analysts leave during the "direction" phase (fka "design, build, validate", i.e., before the go-live), will they be blacklisted? #askingforafriend

Headliner: It's been a few months since Epic Systems Corp v Lewis went to the Supreme Court, and I've been conspicuously silent on the outcome. Too many articles were coming out too frequently to read, and the articles seemed pretty evenly split on whether this was a good or bad decision.

Upon reflection, it's definitely bad. It was this section of a currentaffairs.org article that convinced me:

Since the employees couldn’t organize beforehand to demand their employers respect their legal rights, they attempted to do so on the back end through class action lawsuits—where they could all go to court and hold the employer’s feet to the fire.
But, according to the Supreme Court, employees banding together to sue employers about their illegal labor practices is not the sort of “concerted activity” the NLRA was meant to protect.

I used to be very vehemently anti-union, but my mind has changed the as I've had more jobs. The job I had that was the most fair, the most protected against abuses, was for a company with over half of its employees belonging to a union. Needless to say, that job wasn't in IT.

So, this ruling sucks. IT workers need a union.