I'm sure you've heard something about the Jamie Leigh Jones case, where she went to work for Halliburton in Iraq and was beaten, gang-raped, held hostage and threatened by her co-workers and Halliburton. She finally won her freedom and came home [thanks to her father and her diligent Congressman]. She brought suit for all those things done to her and the defense was that she signed an employment contract requiring her to go through arbitration run by the company.
The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals [Jones v. Halliburton Co., 2009 WL 2940061 (5th Cir. Sept. 15, 2009] just came out with a decision in which it confirmed that although some claims were limited to arbitration in the company, not all of them were.
In the meantime, she also provided sobering testimony to Congress this year about her treatment and the treatment of women by our contractors in Iraq, and about the limitations on her right to a jury trial. As she testified, "it should not be legal for a large multibillion-dollar corporation to force [arbitration] on a person who needs a job to survive and doesn’t understand what the process involves."
Kudos to Jamie Leigh Jones and her counsel on appeal, John Vail of the Center for Constitutional Litigation.
