We are taught from a young age that there is strength in numbers. A grade school teacher hands a student a pencil and asks them to break it, an easy task. She then hands the same student a bundle of pencils. The bigger the bundle, the stronger the pencils become. A big enough bundle is unbreakable.

Yesterday, American workers became individual pencils. And we all became that much easier for corporations to break.

The U.S. Supreme Court voted 5–4 that companies can use arbitration clauses in employment contracts to stop people from joining together in class-action lawsuits to fight workplace abuses. An estimated 25 million private, nonunion employees will be affected, but don’t think of them as a collective group. Think of them as tens of millions of workers who are now forced to stand alone.

The majority ruling was written by Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, who backed the Federal Arbitration Act, a law dating back to 1925 that makes arbitration clauses generally “valid, irrevocable, and enforceable.” In reaffirming a law written when the country was ruled by robber barons, Gorsuch and the four justices who joined him in the majority are thrusting America into a new Gilded Age–one where powerful business entities have more rights than the workers who labor on their behalf.

It’s a continuation of the ruinous illogic behind the Burwell v. Hobby Lobby ruling in 2014, while affirmed that for-profit businesses can hold Constitutionally protected religious beliefs the say way ordinary citizens do. In America, corporations are people, but people are individuals.

As seems to be the case more and more often lately, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg wrote the dissenting opinion, an angry rebuttal she read aloud–and which was five pages longer than the majority opinion. “By joining hands in litigation,” she writes, “workers can spread the cost of litigation and reduce the risk of employer retaliation.”

More than 55% of U.S. workers are now subject to mandatory arbitration. This means that, if you have a problem with your employer, you are obligated to fight them alone, whether that problem is based on lost wages, discrimination, or even sexual harassment. And with this ruling, we can expect mandatory arbitration to increase–despite a vigorous push in Silicon Valley and Hollywood to curb the practice (along with nondisclosure agreements, which employers wield for similar ends).