Labor law:
Arbitration: Saving clause: Class actions:
Should employees and
employers be allowed to agree that any disputes between them will be resolved
through one-on-one arbitration? Or should employees always be permitted to
bring their claims in class or collective actions, no matter what they agreed
with their employers?
As a matter of policy
these questions are surely debatable. But as a matter of law the answer is
clear. In the Federal Arbitration Act, Congress has instructed federal courts
to enforce arbitration agreements according to their terms—including terms
providing for individualized proceedings. Nor can we agree with the employees’
suggestion that the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) offers a conflicting
command. It is this Court’s duty to interpret Congress’s statutes as a
harmonious whole rather than at war with one another. And abiding that duty
here leads to an unmistakable conclusion. The NLRA secures to employees rights
to organize unions and bargain collectively, but it says nothing about how
judges and arbitrators must try legal disputes that leave the workplace and
enter the courtroom or arbitral forum. This Court has never read a right to
class actions into the NLRA—and for three quarters of a century neither did
the National Labor Relations Board. Far from conflicting, the Arbitration Act
and the NLRA have long enjoyed separate spheres of influence and neither
permits this Court to declare the parties’ agreements unlawful.
(…) Still, the
employees suggest the Arbitration Act’s saving clause creates an exception for
cases like theirs. By its terms, the saving clause allows courts to refuse to
enforce arbitration agreements “upon such grounds as exist at law or in equity
for the revocation of any contract.” §2. That provision applies here, the
employees tell us, because the NLRA renders their particular class and
collective action waivers illegal. In their view, illegality under the NLRA is a
“ground” that “exists at law . . . for the revocation” of their arbitration
agreements, at least to the extent those agreements prohibit class or
collective action proceedings (…) The saving clause still can’t save their
cause.
It can’t because the
saving clause recognizes only defenses that apply to “any” contract. In this way
the clause establishes a sort of “equal-treatment” rule for arbitration
contracts. Kindred Nursing Centers L. P. v. Clark, 581 U. S. ___,
___ (2017) (slip op., at 4). The clause “permits agreements to arbitrate to be
invalidated by ‘generally applicable contract defenses, such as fraud, duress,
or unconscionability.’” Concepcion, 563 U. S., at 339. At the same time,
the clause offers no refuge for “defenses that apply only to arbitration or
that derive their meaning from the fact that an agreement to arbitrate is at
issue.” Ibid. Under our precedent, this means the saving clause does not
save defenses that target arbitration either by name or by more subtle methods,
such as by “interfering with fundamental attributes of arbitration.” Id.,
at 344; see Kindred Nursing, supra, at ___ (slip op., at 5). This
is where the employees’ argument stumbles. They don’t suggest that their
arbitration agreements were extracted, say, by an act of fraud or duress or in
some other unconscionable way that would render any contract
unenforceable. Instead, they object to their agreements precisely because they
require individualized arbitration proceedings instead of class or collective
ones. And by attacking (only) the individualized nature of the arbitration
proceedings, the employees’ argument seeks to interfere with one of arbitration’s
fundamental attributes.
(…) The Court recognized
that parties remain free to alter arbitration procedures to suit their tastes,
and in recent years some parties have sometimes chosen to arbitrate on a
classwide basis. Id., at 351. But Concepcion’s essential insight
remains: courts may not allow a contract defense to reshape traditional
individualized arbitration by mandating classwide arbitration procedures
without the parties’ consent.
(U.S.S.C., May 21,
2018, Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis, Docket No. 16-285, J. Gorsuch)
Si un contrat de travail prévoit une clause d’arbitrage, cette clause
doit être respectée en cas de litige, sauf à pouvoir alléguer utilement sa
nullité en invoquant les motifs de nullité contractuels (illicéité, dol,
contrainte notamment). Par ailleurs, si le contrat de travail prévoit une telle
clause d’arbitrage, le droit fédéral ne permet pas à l’employé de participer à
une procédure de classe. En particulier, la Cour n’a jamais jugé qu’un tel
droit pouvait être déduit de la loi fédérale « National Labor Relations
Act (NLRA) ». De la sorte, cette loi s’harmonise sans conflit avec la loi
fédérale sur l’arbitrage. La récente opinion contraire du « National Labor
Relations Board” est ici rejetée. La Cour précise en outre que dite opinion
contraire ne mérite pas de déférence au sens de la jurisprudence Chevron, cette
problématique n’étant pas laissée par le Congrès à l’appréciation de
l’administration.
La Cour dispose ainsi que seuls les moyens permettant d’invoquer la
nullité de tous types de contrats peuvent être invoqués pour tenter d’obtenir
la nullité d’une clause d’arbitrage. De la sorte, un moyen de nullité qui n’est
invocable que contre une clause d’arbitrage est dépourvu d’efficacité. C’est
pourquoi en l’espèce les employés ne sont pas parvenus à obtenir la nullité de
la clause d’arbitrage de leurs contrats de travail : le moyen de nullité
invoqué (une disposition du droit fédéral qui prévoit l’action de classe dans
les rapports de travail, et qui ne pourrait être écartée par une clause
d’arbitrage 1 :1) n’est pas un motif susceptible d’être invoqué dans tous
les litiges contractuels.
Par leur clause d’arbitrage, les parties peuvent moduler la procédure et
choisir par exemple la possibilité d’un arbitrage de classe. Celui-ci ne peut
cependant pas être imposé s’il n’a pas été choisi.
Cette décision a provoqué une opinion dissidente virulente.
