Muzzling Workers: Unionization Avoidance, Labor Conflict, and Mandatory Arbitration in Employment Contracts

Description of Research Project:

There’s a secret your boss doesn’t want you to know: Over half of private sector employees in the US are prohibited from suing their employer in court under the terms of their employment contract — even when their rights are violated due to discrimination, wage theft, or harassment. Instead, workers are forced to take their claims to private arbitration, which research shows systematically favors employers. Even worse, they are mandated to keep silent about the injury they suffered. This means that workers cannot communicate their shared grievances against the boss with one another — an important first step to unionizing — and that repeat offenders get away with the same behavior time and again. It seems likely that employers adopted these new contracts to prevent unionization efforts and to evade regulatory oversight, but we don’t yet have enough data to tell. The current project will construct an original dataset by aggregating statistics on strikes, employment litigation, arbitration disputes, and firm-level characteristics to test if higher rates of labor conflict lead employers to muzzle their workers with mandatory arbitration clauses.

Description of work assigned to SURO Research Assistants:

Research assistants will join the team at the ground-level in the creation of a new, original dataset on an issue at the heart of current labor struggles in the US. Students will have the opportunity to (1) engage in the detective work necessary to discover sources of hard-to-find data, (2) learn about worker’s rights, labor conflict, and the anatomy of the contemporary employment contract, (3) get hands-on experience with the nitty-gritty tasks involved in cleaning and combining multiple sources of data into a master dataset that lends itself to statistical testing, and (4) gain experience with basic quantitative data manipulation and analysis using STATA and/or Excel.

Supervising Faculty Member: Roi Livne

Contact Name: Zoe Chanin

Contact information: zdchanin@umich.edu

Average hours of work per week: 6-9

Range of credit hours students can earn: 2-3

Number of positions available: 3