Fighting Disinformation to End Forced Arbitration

Googlers for Ending Forced Arbitration

For some, the Google Walkout was the climax of anger. For Googlers for Ending Forced Arbitration, the walkout was just the pistol that fired at the beginning of a marathon. The walkout was a moment; the activism that ensued is the movement.

Last year, we made a decision to go deep on arbitration, but go wide on our coalition building to end forced arbitration for everyone. So we launched educational campaigns on social media, told the stories of numerous victims, published essays, organized phone banks and held private and public panel discussions with experts to speak to workers and organized trips to DC on our personal time to advocate for the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act (FAIR Act, HR1423 / S610). We had hundreds of conversations with workers in after hours meetups, walking workers through their contracts and connecting them to lawyers.

But even though those efforts may have prompted Google to end forced arbitration for full-time employees, we see our job as far from over. Our two biggest opponents in the fight to end forced arbitration are 1) those who deny the racial inequities associated with the practice and 2) those who try to convince workers and consumers it’s okay to be stripped of their fundamental legal rights.

This is why we’ve focused 100% of our advocacy on passing the FAIR Act. Only this bill ends the abusive practice of depriving workers of access to the court system, forcing corporations like Alphabet to reckon with their own policies. But when advocating for this bill in DC, we saw firsthand the disinformation campaign perpetuated by bodies like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. We heard preposterous arguments attacking the lawyers on the front lines of holding corporations accountable for their misdeeds. So we spent the summer and early fall talking to trial lawyers to hear their side of the story. Today, we share excerpts of conversations with 8 trial lawyers in our first ever podcast.