Supreme Court justices clash over whether workers can join together to fight a company policy

Los Angeles Times
By David G. Savage
October 2, 2017

The Supreme Court justices returned to the bench Monday ready to argue - and disagree sharply along usual ideological lines - on a basic questions of workers' rights in the 21st century.

Can employees join together to argue their company is violating law by denying them overtime pay or minimum wages or by discriminating against women or minorities?

To the court's four liberal justices, this looked like a case of back to the future.  Early in the 20th century, companies often required workers to waive their rights to join a union or take collective action.  Those agreements were referred to as "yellow dog contracts," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted.  In 1935, under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Congress adopted the National Labor Relations Act, which guaranteed workers a right to join a union and to take "other concerted activities" to protect their interests.  The yellow dog contract became a thing of the past.

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