Mark Hanna Participates in National Bar Panel on Murphy Oil

May 17, 2018

Mark Hanna participated on a panel to discuss "Litigation and Legislative Strategies to Advance Workers' Rights Post-Murphy Oil" at the 2018 AFL-CIO Lawyers Coordinating Committee annual conference in Atlanta.

Mark Hanna presented a paper explaining how employees are forced to play with a stacked deck, as the compulsory arbitration of employment claims becomes more widespread. He correctly anticipated the Supreme Court's terrible decision in Murphy Oil v. NLRB, which upheld employer-forced contracts prohibiting their employees from banding together in lawsuit, as a continuation of a decades-long trend. The decision limits employees' ability to redress workplace issues and weakens the dilapidated National Labor Relations Act.

Mark presented on strategies to use the weaknesses in the arbitration system for the benefit of individual employees as well as employee's continued ability to assert rights in governmental agencies, even when employer's mandate arbitration. Mark also discussed federal and state legislative fixes to the broken labor and employment law regime. Co-panelist Jannah Manansala of Weinberg, Roger & Rosenfeld discussed the California Public Attorney General Act (PAGA) as a vehicle to vindicate employee rights. The panel was moderated by Jessica Chu, Associate General Counsel of the AFL-CIO.

Murphy Anderson attorney Roseann R. Romano co-wrote the panel paper "Murphy Oil and the #MeToo Movement: Mandatory Arbitration Undermines Worker Power." Rosie also developed a video narrated by Murphy Anderson attorney Jason R. Veny on the developments leading up to the Murphy Oil decision, including the decades of Supreme Court decisions sanctifying the Federal Arbitration Act beyond its original application for commercial disputes.