DoorDash?s anti-worker tactics backfired spectacularly in ruling on forced arbitration

Add in the cost of paying for lawyers to represent them in each proceeding, plus the amount the company will have to pay to the workers in each proceeding that it loses, and DoorDash is likely to wind up paying far more money than it would have if it hadn’t tried to strip away many of its workers’ rights.Ordinarily, when thousands of workers at the same company all raise very similar legal claims against that same employer, those workers will join together in a class action lawsuit — a process that allows all of the disputes to be resolved in a single suit rather than in thousands of separate proceedings. And when workers to prevail in arbitration, they typically receive far less money than they would have if their case had been heard by a judge.Class action bans, meanwhile, often allow employers to immunize themselves from liability altogether.Consider the facts of Concepcion, the 2011 decision allowing companies to add class action bans to forced arbitration contracts. “For decades,” he writes in his DoorDash opinion, “the employer-side bar and their employer clients have forced arbitration clauses upon workers, thus taking away their right to go to court, and forced class-action waivers upon them too, thus taking away their ability to join collectively to vindicate common rights.”What makes this recent case different, is that “the workers wish to enforce the very provisions forced on them by seeking, even if by the thousands, individual arbitrations.” When a company imposes a forced arbitration clause and a class action ban on its workers, it often bets that those workers will slink away quietly if the company breaks the law.