The Arbitration Section in Your Employee Handbook Is Not an Agreement to Arbitrate
Posting an arbitration section in your employee handbook may put an employee on notice of a company policy or “offer,” of which the employee could be said to be “generally aware,” but it might not, without more, establish that there is an agreement to arbitrate, pints out Gilbert A. Samberg for Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo.
There must be evidence of the employee’s acceptance, he explains in a post on the firm’s website.
He illustrates his point with a case from the Eighth Circuit, concluding: “An employer needs to be able to prove acceptance by each employee of an ‘offer’ of arbitration.”