× Expand Jennifer Fultz in front of EGS Customer Care, Rockford, Illinois.

A former telecommunications worker whose plight was profiled in The Progressive and included in a book by former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson has won a major victory from a panel of three Trump-appointed members of the National Labor Relations Board.

The NLRB panel ruled on July 25 that Jennifer Fultz of Rockford, Illinois, was wrongfully terminated from her call-center job at Expert Global Solutions, a subsidiary of Alorica Inc. Fultz was fired in September 2016 for refusing to sign an agreement requiring employees to resolve any issues regarding workplace rights through binding arbitration, a venue that prevents collective action and favors employers.

The decision also applies to Clarise Washington, a former employee at an Alorica-owned plant in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, who was fired for the same reason on the same day.

“We find unpersuasive the Respondent’s argument that the Agreement’s interference with [federally established workers] rights is minimal or outweighed by the efficient resolution of workplace disputes,” the panel wrote. “Accordingly, we find that the agreement is unlawful . . . .”

The panel ordered that Alorica compensate Fultz and Washington for lost income and any expenses incurred searching for employment, and offer both full reinstatement to their former jobs. The decision also expressly orders Alorica to cease and desist from using a mandatory arbitration agreement that interferes with employee rights, and from “[t]hreatening to discharge employees for failing or refusing to sign an Agreement to Arbitrate that they reasonably would believe bars or restricts the right to file charges with the NLRB.”

The unanimous ruling, which affirms an October 2017 decision in Fultz’s favor by an administrative law judge, was issued by NLRB Chairman John F. Ring and members William J. Emanuel and Marvin E. Kaplan. All three were appointed by President Donald Trump.

The case was filed on behalf of Fultz and Washington by Seth Goldstein, senior business representative of the Office and Professional Employees International Union, Local 153, based in New York City. Goldstein, in an interview with The Progressive, hailed the decision.

“I’m just happy that we were able to push back against forced arbitration and that the Trump board realized the negative implications of forcing employees to bring unfair labor practices to arbitration,” he says. “All law has cycles and this is the start of pushback against forced arbitration.”

“All law has cycles and this is the start of pushback against forced arbitration.”

While the decision is subject to appeal, Goldstein says the fact that it was rendered by an all-Trump-appointed panel makes that unlikely. The ruling comes a little more than a year after the U.S. Supreme Court, in Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis, upheld the policy of a Wisconsin software company to require its employees to resolve wage and hour claims through individual arbitration, rather than collective or class actions.

Binding arbitration clauses are also used to deny the ability of consumers to collectively sue over unfair business practices. A bill known as the Fair Act, now before Congress, would bar the use of mandatory arbitration agreements in employment, consumer, antitrust, or civil rights disputes and affirm the ability of “individuals, workers, and small businesses to participate in a joint, class, or collective action related to an employment, consumer, antitrust, or civil rights dispute.”

Fultz’s termination was covered by The Progressive in December 2016, in a story about the growing use of mandatory arbitration agreements, in both consumer and employment contexts. Gretchen Carlson used the article as the basis for her account of Fultz’s case in her 2017 book, Be Fierce: Stop Harassment and Take Your Power Back.

The subject of mandatory arbitration is of keen interest to Carlson, whose effort to sue her employer Fox News over sexual harassment ran up against a forced arbitration clause. But Carlson instead filed suit against her harasser, Fox News Chairman and CEO Roger Ailes, eventually receiving a reported $20 million settlement. The agreement prevents Carlson from talking in depth about what happened to her at Fox News, and limits her ability to comment on a new Showtime miniseries, The Loudest Voice in the Room, a dramatization of her sexual harassment. (Ailes also can’t comment, because he died in May 2017.)

At the time of her termination, Fultz, then a thirty-one-year-old single mother, had worked at EGS Customer Care fielding consumer service calls for JPMorgan Chase for four-and-a-half years. The job paid barely $11 an hour, but she was good at it, on three occasions receiving commendations from her team leader.

On September 12, 2016, Fultz arrived for work as usual at 8 a.m. About an hour into her shift, she was summoned to meet with the company’s human resources manager, Katie Aldrich, and presented with an “Agreement to Arbitrate” that she was told she needed to sign. She had been presented with the same document about two months earlier on a company web portal but was uncomfortable with its provisions and “clicked out.”

Fultz’s request to have a lawyer review the document before she signed was denied. She was given thirty minutes to sign it or be fired, time she used to consult with her father, John Fultz, a former factory worker. John told his daughter that she needed to make her own decision. But she pressed him on this point, asking: “What would you do?” After a few minutes, he replied, “Don’t sign it.”

Fultz’s request to have a lawyer review the document before she signed was denied.

By this time, Fultz has already signed the agreement, while writing “under protest” on it. She asked for the form back, telling Aldrich, “I’m here to work. I want to work.” Fultz was fired on the spot and escorted from the premises by the police. “We have an employee who is refusing to leave the premises, or a former employee,” the Rockford emergency dispatch center was told.

Fultz now has a new married name, Jennifer Ames, and a new job. She says she would consider returning to Alorica, per the NLRB’s order, depending on the circumstances. She’s delighted with the outcome and glad that she earlier heeded her father’s advice not to relinquish her rights.

“I really don’t think this is going to prevent employers from trying to underdog their workers,” Ames says. But she thinks her case may make it harder for employers to “push the arbitration issue.”

As she notes, “There are more workers out there than corporations. I hope this decision opens the eyes of the corporations to know that not all of their workers are going to do what they’re told without questioning the ‘why’ behind it.”