Re: It's a start
It was Microsoft themselves who imposed the arbitration clause on their employees,
Calm down in your righteous anger. Your average high tech (and not only high tech) USA contract is a gigantic pile of cut-n-paste drivel with 90% of it originating from the HR dept + lawyers copying someone's else "solution to a potential problem" without giving it a proper consideration. What can be and should be 2-3 pages is instead 60-70 pages of odious crap half of which is illegal in half of the jurisdictions the company operates. From a legal perspective it can be summarized in one word: bullshit.
I strongly suspect that Microsoft's arbitration clauses were not put there out of malice. It was a cut-n-paste + "everyone's doing it, it is industry standard".
By the way, the really evil part of forced arbitration is not the fact that the employee is forced into arbitration. It is the fact that the most evil versions of contracts (I can name the actual Silly Valley companies with those) specify that while the employee CANNOT avoid forced arbitration, the company can. So it can hit the employee with a standard "bankrupt by lawyer fees" gambit without the employee being able to retaliate. There are in fact also a couple of law firms in the valley which specialize in servicing the companies which use these contracts. You can look up either one of them yourself (good idea - to know where not to apply for job).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
