SANTA ANA, Calif. (Legal Newsline) - California courts are refusing to apply a 2022 federal law relating to sexual assault and harassment claims to lawsuits filed before it was signed by President Joe Biden.
The Fourth Appellate District on Jan. 30 affirmed part of an Orange County ruling in Casandra Murrey's sexual harassment lawsuit against General Electric. The courts found the plain language of the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act says it was effective when signed in March 2022 and would not help Murrey keep her claims in open court, as she filed them a year earlier.
However, the Fourth District did find the arbitration agreement Murrey signed when she was hired was unconscionable, allowing her to continue with her lawsuit in Orange County Superior Court.
Congress said during debate of the bill, which passed with bipartisan support, that it was retroactive to contracts currently signed but not cases currently pending.
"In other words, the act is only applicable to cases filed after its enactment," the ruling says.
Murrey said she reported harassment and a groping incident from a supervisor and was told he was "no longer with the company." But she says the company retaliated against her by denying her support for her position and refusing to promote her.
GE filed a motion to compel arbitration eight months after the complaint was filed. It argued employees signed several documents online when they are hired, including one titled "SOLUTIONS: An Alternative Dispute Resolution Procedure."
The manual said disputes would go through two internal levels of review, followed by outside mediation and then arbitration as a last resort.
"I was required to sign multiple documents within a short period of time," Murrey testified. "My hiring manager... informed me that my future employment with GE was contingent upon me signing all onboarding documents including a document entitled Solutions."
Solutions also stipulated GE could change the terms of the process without notice at any time.
"Murrey argues there was a greater degree of procedural unconscionability in her case because GE did not provide her with a copy of the DRO’s arbitration rules, which, according to the Solutions manual, governed any arbitration proceedings between the parties," the ruling says.
"This omission, however, was but one small piece of a much larger secrecy problem. GE also did not disclose the name of the arbitration provider or the location of the proceedings. The amount of information withheld from Murrey in this case is what sets it apart from those where a copy of the American Arbitration Association’s (AAA) rules, or the Judicial Arbitration and Mediation Service’s (JAMS) rules, were omitted and simply incorporated by reference."