Horton Rises

Although the Fifth Circuit tried to put a stake in the heart of the NLRB's Horton decision, the Board confirmed its vitality today in its opinion in Murphy Oil U.S.A. The bottom line:  the NLRB "reaffirmed the D.R. Horton rationale and applied it to find that the employer violated section 8(a)(1) of the NLRA "by requiring its employees to agree to resolve all employment-related claims through individual arbitration" and by trying "to enforce the unlawful agreements in Federal district court" when employees filed a collective action against the company under the FLSA.

Tim Glynn and  I have written about the issue before, and I've blogged about it on Workplace Prof , so I won't belabor the point. Suffice it to say that, although Horton has to date not been well-received outside of the Board and the law reviews, the jury is still out on whether the NLRA bars employers from foreclosing any kind of concerted action in a court or arbitral forum. Indeed, there's an appeal before the Second Circuit which will provide another opportunity for the viability of the theory to be tested. 

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