EDITORIAL: U.S. Supreme Court gets it right on workplace arbitration

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 this week that companies can require workers to settle employment disputes through individual arbitration as an alternative to collective or class action lawsuits. The decision was the proper reading of federal law, and it highlights once again how the liberal justices prefer to act as lawmakers on the bench.

The workers who brought the case — Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis — argued that the National Labor Relations Act made it illegal for any contract to deny employees the right to pursue “concerted activities” for the purpose of “mutual aid and protection.”

This argument that collective action cannot be blocked was the crux of a spirited dissent from leftist Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who called the decision “egregiously wrong” and underlined some of her objections aloud from the bench.

“The court today holds enforceable these arm-twisted, take-it-or-leave-it contracts — including the provisions requiring employees to litigate wage and hours claims only one-by-one,” she said. “Federal labor law does not countenance such isolation of employees.”

In fact, the only one who was “egregiously wrong” was Justice Ginsburg.

The Federal Arbitration Act holds that such agreements are “valid, irrevocable, and enforceable, save upon such grounds as exist at law or in equity for the revocation of any contract.” The idea that the National Labor Relations Act somehow invalidated this concept was created out of whole cloth in 2012 by the unelected progressives on President Barack Obama’s National Labor Relations Board. As the Wall Street Journal noted Tuesday, even the NLRB’s general counsel rejected that “novel ruling.”

Justice Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion was, in fact, a model of judicial restraint.

“The respective merits of class actions and private arbitration as means of enforcing the law are questions constitutionally entrusted not to the courts to decide,” he wrote, “but to the policymakers in the political branches where those questions remain hotly contested. This court is not free to substitute its preferred economic policies for those chosen by the people’s representatives.”

In other words, it’s not the court’s job to write new laws to reach desired outcomes — a concept too frequently lost these days on progressive jurists such as Justice Ginsburg.

Justice Gorsuch and the rest of the majority ruled correctly in this case. Those who oppose arbitration in workplace disputes should urge Congress to rewrite the Federal Arbitration Act instead of trying to find sympathetic judges eager to legislate from the federal bench by determining that the law doesn’t mean what it says.