Wage claim waiver database/browser extension

Question

Wage claim waiver database/browser extension

mscarey opened this issue 6 years ago · 0 comments

What problem are you trying to solve?

On May 21, 2018, the Supreme Court announced, in a 5-4 party-line vote, that it's valid for employers to require employees to waive their right to any recovery on future wage claims, whether in court or in arbitration, as a condition for being hired or keeping their jobs. (Although employees can have an arbitration, employers can set procedures that prevent employees from recovering any money no matter who wins.) This decision essentially leaves it to the free market whether employers will be able to opt out of wage laws completely, but many job seekers and employees aren't informed enough about the issue to be able to bargain effectively. Most job listings don't include this information about the employer.

The project idea is a web directory of employers, with answers to the following questions:

Does the employer require employees to waive the right to enforce payment of wages under their contracts?
Does the employer require employees to waive the right to recover for wage discrimination based on protected categories such as race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, age, pregnancy, or familial status?

The project could potentially include a browser extension to add wage waiver information to job listings on the web.

Who will benefit (directly and indirectly) from your project?

Employment agreements for an estimated 25 million Americans already contain waivers of wage claims. Many of these employees signed the agreement under the assumption they'd never be enforceable. After the Supreme Court's ruling, at least one law firm released a product to automate the process of obtaining waivers from employees, so many more people will probably be impacted soon.

What other resources/tools are currently serving the same need? How does your project set itself apart?

There's no such directory yet, as far as I can find.

Where can we find any research/data available/articles?

Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis, the May 21 Supreme Court decision.
LexPredict ContraxSuite is an open source library for analyzing contracts. The training data includes employment contracts.

What help do you need now?

Data acquisition is the biggest problem. There are some public court filings available that reveal some employers with wage waiver contracts. An option is to ask users to report waiver contracts they've encountered, or to share their own employment agreements, but there are privacy concerns and participation might be low.

What are the next steps (validation, research, coding, design)?

Design and data acquisition.

How can we contact you outside of Github(list social media or places you're present)?

On Open Austin Slack.

Project management

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