A federal appeals court yesterday ruled that companies cannot force their employees to sign away their right to band together in legal actions, the New York Times reported today. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit struck down an arbitration clause that banned employees from joining together as a class and required workers to battle the employer one by one outside of court. In its opinion, the three-judge panel said that Epic Systems, a Verona, Wis., health care software provider, violated federal labor law when it required its workers to bring any disputes individually to arbitration, a private system of justice where there is no judge or jury. By preventing employees from joining together in a collective action, the court said, the arbitration clause ran afoul of a critical piece of the National Labor Relations Act, a landmark 1935 law that gave workers the right to unionize and engage in concerted action.
