In “Part I: How Workplace ADR Will Evolve Under the Biden Administration,” CPR intern Antranik Chekemian reviewed on CPR Speaks the first half of comments during an online panel discussion hosted in late February by CPR’s Employment Disputes Committee and its Government & ADR Task Force.  Washington, D.C., arbitrator Mark Kantor focused on prospects for legislative changes for employment and labor ADR issues, and possible regulation, while Mark Gaston Pierce, Visiting Professor and Executive Director of the Georgetown University Law Center Workers’ Rights Institute, covered labor developments in decisions of the National Labor Relations Board, where he served as chairman from 2011 to 2017.  After their presentations, panel moderator Arthur Pearlstein, who is Director of Arbitration for the Federal Mediation & Conciliation Service, turned to panelist Kathryn Siegel, a shareholder in Littler Mendelsohn’s Chicago office, before concluding with a general discussion. Highlights from the second half of the program appear below.

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By Antranik Chekemian

Kathryn Siegel mainly focused on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which, like the National Labor Relations Board, also has five members.

Siegel noted that she did not expect to see drastic EEOC policy changes during the Biden administration. Even though the chair has recently been changed by President Biden, a Republican majority still exists in the commission.

The general counsel at the Feb. 24 seminar date, Sharon Fast Gustafson, was fired by Biden March 5, and replaced by veteran EEOC attorney Gwendolyn Young Reams, who is now Acting General Counsel. Gustafson was a Republican appointee whose term would not have expired until August 2023.

Still, Siegel pointed out, “There is still going to be a Republican [board] majority through at least July of 2022, possibly through the end of 2022 because of the terms of the Republicans,” she said.  Siegel concluded that this will prevent the Biden-appointed chair from advancing Democratic policy initiatives and significant changes through at least the middle of next year.

Regarding the impact of the changes in the EEOC on arbitration/mediation, Siegel noted the “conclusion of the two six-month pilot programs relating to the agency’s conciliation and mediation efforts.”

She provided insights on the program. “The message of the… pilot was to mediate early, mediate often, mediate late, and mediate all the time,” she said. She emphasized that parties could mediate at any stage of any charge, and that it did not have to be at the outset.

She added that the parties in Category B charges—those that require more EEOC investigation to substantiate and pursue–were the ones that were being invited to mediation.  Siegel said, “What we saw during this pilot program was that you could really mediate even the EEOC’s high-priority charges that advanced an issue of law that the EEOC potentially wanted to litigate, that had . . . kind of bad facts in it.”

After the mediation pilot’s conclusion, however, there is not going to be an opportunity to mediate high priority charges. Siegel noted that even though this is a big change, it would not be difficult to adapt to this change as the pilot program was only six months long.

She also discussed the pilot program on conciliation that was launched around the same time as the mediation pilot program. The conciliation program also was officially dropped in January. Siegel, however, noted that a rule was established just before the EEOC’s chair changed. “That final rule as to the new EEOC conciliation and how that will be handled is in place for now,” she said.

Siegel added that the rule will last until the Democrats get the majority back sometime in 2022. She said that the conciliation process rule change provided that the “EEOC must provide factual support for its reasonable cause finding and its damages calculations as part of the conciliation process.”

She then discussed another 2020 change she observed with the EEOC regarding “the number of investigations and how robust those investigations were.” Even for charges that were classed as Category B, she said, requests for position statements were lower than before, and the investigations ended more quickly. She noted that this could have been the result of both the Trump administration and Covid-19, and predicted that investigations will likely ramp up again as things get back to normal post-pandemic.

“Part of that speed in which charges were pushed through and right-to-sues were issued was a result of pressure from the administration to clear a backlog,” she said, adding to “expect that there will be a little bit of the brakes put on, slowing down, to make sure that each charge gets due time in investigation.”

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Moderator Arthur Pearlstein then directed a question to panelist Mark Kantor regarding how administrative actions could potentially affect class action waivers and arbitration. Pearlstein further asked Kantor to clarify the 2019 U.S. Supreme Court Lamps Plus decision.

Kantor noted that Lamps Plus provides that “the presumption is that arbitration is individualized and there is not collective arbitration unless the arbitration clause clearly provides for that.” He also said, however, that “in most circumstances . . . the question of what the arbitration clause says would be delegated to the arbitrator.”

In Lamps Plus, Inc. v. Varela, 139 S.Ct. 1407 (2019), the U.S. Supreme Court provided that because the individualized form of arbitration was envisioned by the Federal Arbitration Act, “Courts may not infer from an ambiguous agreement that parties have consented to arbitration on a classwide basis.” The decision further notes that the class arbitration lacks the benefits of individualized arbitration. “It [class arbitration] sacrifices the principal advantage of arbitration – its informality – and makes the process slower, more costly, and more likely to generate procedural morass than final judgment.”

Kantor said, “A very large number of arbitration clauses in employment agreements, consumer contracts and the like . . . expressly waive the right to bring a class proceeding in arbitration as well as in court.”

He concluded that “a regulatory measure from an independent agency or an executive agency would prohibit that claim . . . in a contract so long as it was aimed at all forums. Not focusing on arbitration has a good chance of passing muster under [Epic Systems v. Lewis] and that might override the literally millions of clauses out there in existing contracts that provide for waivers of class proceedings.”

Pearlstein then noted the “obvious difficulty in getting major legislation passed regarding labor and employment issues” and asked the panelists about the chances of less-dramatic piecemeal legislation passing in Congress. He also asked about the Biden administration’s role with administrative actions and whether it means agencies like the National Labor Relations Board and the EEOC “become more important than they have ever been, or, certainly, in a long time?”

Siegel said that rulemaking has already been used a substitute for doing things at the NLRB, and that this was effective in dictating policy goals. She added that this was an alternative presented at the agency level as a common law substitute. “They did not want to have to wait for the case to come up before them to rule,” she said, and “in lieu of waiting for Congress and having to pass legislation that is not exactly what they would want and as a compromise, that would be an alternative.”

Mark Gaston Pearce said that “rulemaking will show up and go the other direction and use up a lot of agency resources in that regard.” Regarding a piecemeal legislative approach, Pearce noted that it’s “more likely than a wholesale acceptance of a statute like the PRO Act, because there may not be enough Democratic senators — much less Republicans — that are going to buy into the entire measure, but as Mark Kantor suggests, it’s very possible that they can tag on particular key measures of the PRO Act into must-have legislation in order to get some of that across.”

There was a question from the audience asking whether there is proposed federal legislation that would restrict waivers of jury trials, which companies might use as an alternative to class-action waivers.


Mark Kantor responded that he was not aware of any standalone legislation aiming at prohibiting jury-trial waivers. He said, “We do know that several states have enacted legislation, for example, California and Georgia, achieving that result in their own state courts, but at the federal level, again, you’re going to run into the filibuster, so it’s unlikely you would find Republican support in the Senate for legislation like that, and it is equally unlikely that you could obtain 60 votes, a closure vote to override filibuster. It’s not going to be budget reconciliation, which means you’re looking at appending it to a must-pass legislation.”

Panelist Kathryn Siegel also noted that states attempt to accomplish certain goals when it’s not possible at the federal level, especially in the context of arbitration limits. “We have seen states,” she said, “such as Illinois, trying to . . . make their own rules as to arbitration and when you can require arbitration of disputes.” She further added even though such laws are going to be preempted by the FAA, many states pass them “hoping that they have crafted it in a way that it avoids the issues that other states have had or that no one will notice.”

An attendee asked the panel whether they “expect a Biden majority to overturn the NLRB’s General Motors decision by re-implementing the specific tests for evaluating discipline for conduct that occurred during protected concerted activity, instead of the Wright Line standard.”

According to the new standard provided by the General Motors decision, the NLRB General Counsel must show that “(1) the employee engaged in Section 7 activity, (2) the employer knew of that activity, and (3) the employer had animus against the Section 7 activity, which must be proven with evidence sufficient to establish a causal relationship between the discipline and the Section 7 activity.”

The General Motors decision provided that the conflict between the anti-discrimination laws and the setting-specific standards explained below required the adoption of the Wright Line standard. The NLRB further cited the EEOC and mentioned that discrimination laws do not forgive abusive conduct when it arises from heated feelings about working conditions or because crude language is common in the workplace. The decision also characterized the setting-specific standards to be “wholly indifferent to employers’ legal obligations to prevent hostile work environments on the basis of protected traits.”

The General Motors case replaced several setting-specific standards:

• The Atlantic Steel standard on workplace discussions with management: To determine whether abusive conduct by the employee during protected concerted activity was severe enough to lose the National Labor Relations Act’s protection, the Board had  applied a four-factor standard: (1) the place of the discussion; (2) the subject matter of the discussion; (3) the nature of the employee’s outburst; and (4) whether the outburst was, in any way, provoked by an employer’s unfair labor practice. General Motors noted that because the Board had not assigned any specific weight to any of these factors, the Board’s application of these factors resulted in inconsistent outcomes over the years. Furthermore, the second factor – the subject matter of the discussion – favored the protection of the employees as the Atlantic Steel factors only applied when the subject matter was related to Section 7 activity. NLRA Section 7 provides that “employees shall have the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations… and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid protection.” The Board in General Motors also criticized the shortcomings of the Atlantic Steel standard as it was “giving little, if any, consideration to employers’ right to maintain order and respect.”

• The totality of the circumstances on social media posts and coworker discussions: The General Motors decision also replaced the totality of the circumstances standard that had applied to social-media posts and coworker discussions. “The Board’s flexibility in considering a wider of range of facts in each specific circumstance promises to create the same, if not more, inconsistency and unpredictability,” noted the decision.

• The Clear Pine Mouldings Test for conduct taking place on the picket line: Cases that applied the 1978 Clear Pine Mouldings test had found that the employees lose NLRA protection only when “it involves an overt or implied threat or where there is reasonable likelihood of an imminent physical confrontation.” General Motors noted that, “As a result, the Board has found appallingly abusive picket-line misconduct to retain protection, including racially and sexually offensive language.”

The NLRB further concluded in General Motors that absent evidence of discrimination against Section 7 activity, there is no merit of “finding violations of federal labor law against employers that act in good faith to maintain civil, inclusive, and healthy workplaces for their employees. These results [from setting-specific standards] simply do not advance the Board’s mission of promoting labor peace or any of the other principles animating the Act.”

After the General Motors decision, the Trump-appointed Chairman, John F. Ring praised the decision. “For too long,” he stated, “the Board has protected employees who engage in obscene, racist, and sexually harassing speech not tolerated in almost any workplace today. Our decision in General Motors ends this unwarranted protection, eliminates the conflict between the NLRA and antidiscrimination laws, and acknowledges that the expectations for employee conduct in the workplace have changed.” President Biden replaced Ring on Jan. 20 with NLRB member Lauren McFerran; Ring’s board term continues through Dec. 16, 2022.

Panelist Mark Gaston Pearce noted that the applicability of the Wright Line standard during protected concerted activity should be fleshed out and that it was an overreach. Even though Pearce said he believed there was a need for a fix with respect to Title 7-type situations, the test could have been within the realm of the existing test–the Clear Pine Mouldings test.

Pearce further acknowledged Clear Pine Mouldings’ shortcomings, noting that under this test, “racial and sexual derogatory remarks were not sufficient to take protection away from the actor, because they were not violence or threats of violence.” He noted that the NLRB had failed to look at the situations from the viewpoint of the recipient of those kinds of remarks, and what kind of reaction that had.

Pearce expressed his concerns regarding the new Wright Line standard that when it comes to obscene or profane remarks made during the heat of the moment or during an exchange between someone engaged in protected concerted activity and management, noting that such circumstances should be treated differently.

He further added that the Wright Line standard does not respond to what happens when management has provoked a response in the course of protected concerted activity. He further explained:

It may well be while that standard exists, these issues are going to have to be fleshed out before an arbitrator who is using the just-cause standard. Because of course if someone was provoked into something in a unionized setting, and it comes out in an arbitration, . . . [the] arbitrator has the ability to weigh those kinds of determinations and [make] an assessment as to whether or not there was just cause for them to act the way it did.

In a non-union setting, that opportunity does not present itself, so there is an inequitable situation there. Furthermore, if employees don’t know what they can say or how they should say, they will censor, self-censor and deny themselves the ability to engage in rights protected under the National Labor Relations Act. The Supreme Court says, and there are several cases that say, that the NLRB and the courts are not in the business of making civility codes.

A seminar attendee asked the panel, “What changes in labor arbitration should we expect with federal agencies like the VA, Capitol Police, Bureau of Prisons, military bases, etc.?”

Moderator Pearlstein first responded that the Capitol Police is not under the Federal Labor Relations Act authority. As to federal agencies in general, he said, “There are dramatic changes on the horizon once the makeup of the NLRB changes . . . and once things rotate into a Democratic majority.”

He said that “the changes under the Trump board at the NLRB were so dramatic, reversing so much precedent, that I think you’re going to start seeing quite a lot of change as that catches up.”

Regarding executive orders, Pearlstein noted that “the president has already reversed all the executive orders basically that applied to the federal workplace.”

There was a question asking whether the EEOC will go back to its prior policy criticizing mandatory arbitration once the Democrats get the majority.

Panelist Kathryn Siegel responded that the “EEOC and most of the federal agencies . . . once they are able to effectuate Democratic policies, they are going to pretend like the last four years were just a nightmare and return as quickly as possible to the policies and the plans that they had prior to the Trump election.”

Therefore, she said, it is likely that there will be a return to what was being advanced by Democrats four years ago.

Panelist Pearce added that NLRB’s “only issue was solely with respect to class-action waivers. The NLRB didn’t challenge mandatory arbitration, because the FAA . . . [and] other Supreme Court cases [concluded] that mandatory arbitration is the rule of the day.”

Pearce said the NLRB’s Epic Systems concern was “the flip handling of what constitutes concerted activity  . . and what kind of impact that will have on future cases.” He added, “Certainly, this Trump board did its best to clamp down on protected concerted activity definitions and issued some cases that really restricted that. I agree in that respect that the Biden board will go in the other direction.”

Another attendee asked: “Is there any attempt to have Congress address the extent to which the Federal Arbitration Act can be used?”

Said panelist Mark Kantor, “That is exactly what the FAIR Act will aim at. It will pass the House. It will get hearings and committee action in the Senate. but it seems highly unlikely that it will be enacted by the Senate over a filibuster in light of vote counting,” said Kantor (see links above to Kantor’s discussion in Part I, which also includes links to his CPR Speaks articles on the subject).

Moderator Arthur Pearlstein then asked whether there will be an effect on the market for labor and employment arbitration under the Biden administration.

Panelist Siegel replied that the NLRB Trump Board policy was to defer to arbitration as frequently and as early as possible. In 2019, the Board replaced the Babcock standard and returned to the less rigorous standards of Spielberg/Olin [cited and explained in Babcock] to defer to arbitration in cases alleging discharge and discipline in violation of NLRA Sections 8(a)(3) and (1).

Siegel noted that fewer cases were being decided by the Board when there was a parallel proceeding in arbitration. Considering the possibility of a new Board reverting to the Babcock standard which makes arbitration less likely, Siegel concluded that it followed that this could negatively affect the number of cases in the labor and employment arbitration market.

Finally, Mark Kantor mentioned that in its 2019 decision, New Prime Inc. v. Oliveira, “the Supreme Court made clear that the exclusion from enforcement of arbitration agreements under the Federal Arbitration Act for transportation workers did extend to an independent trucker, by application to independent contractors in the transportation field.”

He noted that “the Court was very careful to signal that the interpretation was only to apply to the Federal Arbitration Act and not to any other legislation. There was nothing in that decision signaling that the Court might wish to rethink its interpretation of the exclusion to go beyond transportation workers into other industries.”

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The author, a second-year student at New York’s Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, is a CPR 2021 intern.

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You can read the final installment of Antranik Chekemian’s report on the CPR workplace and employment seminar at Part III: Deference Change–Analysis of a Shift on a Labor Arbitration Review Standard (April 26).

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