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Full-Text Articles in Law
The Paga Saga, Tamar Meshel
The Paga Saga, Tamar Meshel
Pepperdine Law Review
Employees routinely enter into employment contracts that contain arbitration agreements and prohibit them from bringing class and/or representative actions. These employees may therefore only bring claims against their employers, whether contractual or statutory, in arbitration on an individual basis. Such arbitration agreements and the class/representative action waivers that they contain are enforced nationwide pursuant to the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA). In California, however, a judge-made rule (the Iskanian rule) prohibits the enforcement of representative action waivers found in arbitration agreements with respect to employees’ claims of Labor Code violations under California’s Private Attorney General Act (PAGA). A judicial battle is …
Refusing Work To Avoid Serious Injury Or Death: An Empirical Study Of Legal Protections Before And During Covid-19, Michael H. Leroy
Refusing Work To Avoid Serious Injury Or Death: An Empirical Study Of Legal Protections Before And During Covid-19, Michael H. Leroy
Pepperdine Law Review
I present data on court and administrative rulings involving employees who were disciplined or quit after refusing to work due to concerns about death or injury. My sample of 109 pre-pandemic cases from 1944–2020, and its comparison to twelve COVID-19 cases in 2020 and 2021, shows an emerging picture of new forms of work refusal. The cases before COVID-19 were concentrated in mining, construction, and transportation. In contrast, the COVID-19 cases span new occupations in social services, education, law, healthcare, protective services, food preparation, and building cleaning. Before COVID-19, employees lost most work refusal cases because laws such as the …