After the Redskins’ Oct. 18 loss to the Kansas City Chiefs, a top team official sat down with Coach Jim Zorn. The message was that the coach would no longer be calling plays or have any real game-day duties. Then the official—presumably Vinny Cerrato—brought up Zorn’s contract and said, essentially, “This says we can do whatever we want to you, sucker!”

Yes, Snyder puts sucker clauses in the contracts of even the bigwigs in the Redskins organization. Little folks, too.

James Rubin, an employment lawyer based in Montgomery County, knows all about that. A group of six current and former Redskins ticket office employees had come to Rubin last season alleging that Snyder wasn’t paying them overtime wages. Rubin sent the team a letter outlining the situation and requesting the workers be paid what they’d earned.

If his clients weren’t made whole by the team, Rubin would file a lawsuit.

No, you won’t, responded the Redskins. The team told Rubin that the Skins workers had signed away their right to a day in court— a real court, anyway. The Redskins sent Rubin copies of the employment contract, which contained a so-called binding arbitration clause. The ticket workers’ only recourse, the contracts stipulated, would be to take their dispute to the New York–based American Arbitration Association.

That’s an organization that was hired by the Redskins. So the judge and jury deciding their fate would be paid for by Snyder. And the faux trial would be held behind closed doors, with no public record of the case. To show how much confidence the Redskins had in their hired court system: After receiving Rubin’s request for OT pay, the team fired any of his clients who were still on the payroll.

Turns out that as a condition of employment with the Redskins, the workers had given up their right to justice—at least, the sort of justice Americans take for granted. Rubin declined to discuss specifics of the situation, citing an April arbitration hearing. Since taking the case, Rubin has added another six former ticket office employees as clients. Their hearing will be held in the offices of the Redskins’ attorneys. Talk about a home field advantage. That’s the closest they’ll ever get to a trial, says Rubin.

A spring study on the general awareness of so-called binding pre-dispute mandatory arbitration clauses by a coalition of do-gooder groups, including Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen, found that 79 percent of likely voters believed they could take an employer to court even if they had agreed to such a clause. Only 11 percent understood that the right to use the courts could be taken away willy-nilly by an employer.

“People don’t know that they’ve signed that right away,” says Graham Steele, a lawyer and lobbyist for Congress Watch, another Nader confab. “We’re talking about a process that is all secret, by design, often with no public record, no published decision. Most people don’t know this situation even exists. And they can’t believe they don’t have these rights.”

And taking away employees’ ability to sue, as Snyder does, is totally legal. Steele says that laws allowing arbitration have been on the books since 1925, originally put in place to speed up the settlement of disputes between big corporations in matters like shipping. Banks and communications companies have been inserting binding arbitration clauses into consumer contracts for years: If you have a credit card or a cellphone, you’ve probably signed such a deal. Employers have caught on to the advantages of putting mandatory clauses in employment only rather recently, Steele says, and the Supreme Court’s decisions going back to the 1980s have strengthened their ability to do so.
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