Back in 2020, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled that companies requiring employees to go into arbitration to settle disputes can add a confidentiality clause to the agreement. Now, the agency is rethinking its decision. The NLRB has posted an invitation for the public to submit briefs on whether it should adopt a new legal standard to determine if gag orders in mandatory arbitration agreements violate Section 8(a)(1) of the National Labor Relations Act, as well as other legal issues. 

Section 8(a)(1) states that it’s unfair labor practice for employers to “interfere with, restrain or coerce employees” when it comes to exercising their right to self-organization. As Bloomberg Law states, this could lead to arbitration agreements that are more worker-friendly, since the absence of confidentiality clauses means they can talk about their issue publicly and ask help from the appropriate administrative agencies if needed. 

Private arbitrations that force workers to keep mum about their issue and the proceedings are a controversial practice. They prevent workers who may be dealing with the same problem to connect, thereby preventing the public and the rest of a company’s workers to see emerging patterns. Companies have landed in hot water for forcing issues like sexual harassment into arbitration in the past, that some have chosen to end the practice. Over 150 Riot Games employees staged a walkout after the developer forced the women who filed sexism lawsuits against it into arbitration in 2019. In the same year, Google decided to end forced arbitrations for sexual harassment cases after a walkout involving 20,000 workers. Airbnb and Activision Blizzard are two other companies that decided to stop forced arbitration for sexual harassment cases.

Source: Engadget – US labor board reconsiders rule that allow gag orders in arbitration agreements

Amazon is being sued by the family of delivery driver Austin McEwan who died in the Edwardsville, Illinois warehouse struck by a tornado last month, CNET has reported. The lawsuit alleges that Amazon was negligent, citing the fact that it told people to keep working through extreme weather warnings. It also makes claims of negligence against contractors who helped build the warehouse. 

McEwan was one of six people killed when the warehouse roof was hit by a tornado and collapsed. The family of victim Deandre Morrow has also retained a lawyer. “Sadly, it appears that Amazon placed profits first during this holiday season instead of the safety of our son and the other five,” said McEwan’s mother, Alice McKewan in a press conference. 

“Severe weather watches are common in this part of the country and, while precautions are taken, are not cause for most businesses to close down,” Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel told CNET in a statement. “We believe our team did the right thing as soon as a warning was issued.” The company said that the warehouse was built four years ago in accordance with building code requirements. 

Edwardsville is in a region known as Wind Zone IV, a part of the US most at risk from tornadoes. The National Weather Service warned of a tornado threat 36 hours before they struck, and the morning before the storms, it cautioned of the “likely threat” of “damaging winds in excess of 60 mph.”

During the same incident, an Amazon dispatcher pressured a driver to deliver packages amid tornado alarms, threatening her with termination. Amazon said that the dispatcher “didn’t follow the standard safety practice” and should have directed the driver to seek shelter. Meanwhile, Democrats have pressed Amazon for details on the warehouse deaths, saying in a letter that the incident “fit a larger pattern” of Amazon putting safety at risk “in everyday situations and emergencies alike.” 

Source: Engadget – Amazon sued by family of employee killed in Illinois tornado warehouse collapse

A Tesla owner is facing the first felony charges filed against someone using a partially automated driving system in the US, according to AP. The defendant, Kevin George Aziz Riad, was driving a Model S when he ran a red light and crashed into a Honda Civic at a California intersection in 2019. It ended up killing the Civic’s two passengers, while Riad and his companion sustained non-life threatening injuries. California prosecutors filed two counts of vehicular manslaughter against Riad in October last year.

The court documents reportedly didn’t mention anything about Autopilot. However, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which has been investigating the incident over the past couple of years, recently confirmed that it was switched on at the time of the crash. The NHTSA formally opened a probe into Tesla’s driver assistance system in August last year following a string of 11 crashes involving parked first responder vehicles that killed 17 people. It’s also investigating other types of crashes with Tesla vehicles, including one complaint blaming the beta version of the company’s Full Self Driving technology for a collision in California. 

As AP notes, Riad is the first to face charges involving a widely used driver assistance technology, but he’s not the very first person using an automated driving system to be charged in the US. In 2020, an Uber backup driver was charged with negligent homicide after the company’s autonomous test vehicle struck and killed a pedestrian in Arizona. According to an investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), Uber’s technology detected the victim more than five seconds before the crash but wasn’t able to identify her as a pedestrian. The driver could have avoided the crash if she had been paying attention. 

The NHTSA told AP in a statement that “every vehicle requires the human driver to be in control at all times” even if it has a partially automated system. On its Autopilot page, Tesla says that Autopilot is “intended for use with a fully attentive driver, who has their hands on the wheel and is prepared to take over at any moment.”

Source: Engadget – Tesla driver in fatal California crash first to face felony charges involving Autopilot

Lyft has already splashed out $14.4 million towards a likely November ballot measure in Massachusetts which would cement its drivers as contractors, rather than employees — and the vast majority of those funds were paid in a single, $13 million donation, the largest in the state’s history by a considerable margin. It’s an unambiguous opening salvo in what will likely be a bitter and protracted battle, the playbook for which Lyft and its gig work peers successfully tested in California two years ago. 

As the Boston Globereports, Lyft has thus far contributed the lion’s share of the Flexibility and Benefits for Massachusetts Drivers committee’s $17.2 million war chest, which is intended to fund the forthcoming ballot measure. The rest comes from Uber, DoorDash and Instacart owner Maplebear. The previous record for largest single donation was nearly a third the size: a $5.1 million contribution from General Motors in 2020. 

Currently Lyft and Uber are engaged in a lawsuit, filed by the Attorney General of Massachusetts, which contends that the companies have been misclassifying their driver workforce as contractors. Leveraging contractor status relieves them of many of the costs and obligations associated with employees — such as minimum wage, healthcare and overtime pay — but true contractors typically control how and when they work, and what they charge for their services. Whether or not ridershare drivers actually have that level of autonomy has become a point of legal contention in several of the states and countries in which these companies operate.

California thus far has prosecuted its defense of gig-workers-as-employees most vociferously, first through a state Supreme Court ruling in 2018, then through AB5, a successfully-passed bill that (however briefly) enshrined these kinds of drivers as employees. It went into effect on January 1, 2020 and was overturned by ballot measure Proposition 22 that November. Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart and Postmates dumped a historic $224 million into the proposition — outspending their opposition, which largely consisted of labor unions, by more than 10-to-1 — the most expensive ballot measure in California history. 

Although Prop 22 was eventually ruled unconstitutional, the strategy has thus far been successful for gig work companies. Legislative changes have been tied up in court, and nowhere in the United States are Lyft or Uber drivers currently entitled to the entire slate of benefits enjoyed by full-time employees.

In making their case for Prop 22, gig companies essentially employed two lines of attack. The first, against its own workers, was a facile attempt to tie the concept of “flexibility” to contractor status, an utterly false dichotomy perpetuated by the companies themselves. The second was to convince voters in California that the costs associated with a fleet of employee drivers would either force them to scale back service or raise prices. 

After Prop 22 passed, every single company that backed it raised prices anyway. Uber’s CEO also recently contended on a call with investors that, in the face of potential employee-status regulations in the European Union, Uber can, in fact, afford to “make any model work” financially. We’ve reached out to Lyft to ask if it’s in a similar position.

Given this much publicized bait-and-switch, it seems unlikely the Flexibility and Benefits for Massachusetts Drivers committee will be able to successfully argue the same case regarding cost to consumers. Still, the $17.2 million already amassed has paid for, as the Globe reports, a slew of big-name political consultancies who were behind what is currently the most expensive (and likely to soon the be the second-most expensive) ballot measure in Massachusetts history, which sought to stymie a right to repair law.

Are you a gig work driver or courier working in Massachusetts? Download Signal messenger for iOS or Android and text me confidentially at 646 983 9846 and let’s keep in touch.

Source: Engadget – Lyft is spending millions to stop Massachusetts drivers from becoming employees