On Monday, September 12, Fultz was summoned to a meeting with the human resources manager at her company, EGS Customer Care. She was given a form and told she needed to sign it. The form, titled “Agreement to Arbitrate,” bore the name of EGS’s parent company, Alorica. It pledged employees to resolve all workplace claims and disputes through arbitration and not “class action, collective action, and representative action procedures.”
Fultz says she asked to see a lawyer and was denied. Instead, she was given thirty minutes to sign or else be deemed to have voluntarily resigned. What happened next highlights both the casual contempt companies like Alorica have for the rights of their workers and the extraordinary courage of Jennifer Fultz, who took a stand on principle rooted in her own family’s experience. * * *
* * * Jennifer Fultz * * * left work that day escorted by police, with a box of belongings the company had retrieved from her desk. She was fired and lost her health insurance. Her former employer initially fought her efforts to obtain unemployment benefits. She went from living paycheck to paycheck to struggling day by day.
(HT: Gregory Gauthier)
