Jamie Leigh Jones, a contractor employee of KBR in Iraq, was gang raped by several co-workers and locked in a shipping container so that the crime could be covered up. When she tried to sue KBR, she was told that her employment contract with them required her to go to internal arbitration rather than the court system.
On Tuesday, freshman Sen. Al Franken succeeded in getting an amendment to the Defense Appropriations Bill which would bar contractors from Department of Defense work if they required mandatory arbitration for assault cases, rather than allowing the victim their day in court. One would think this would get nearly unanimous bipartisan support, but the amendment passed, 68 to 30, mostly along party lines.
The shameful part of this story is that 30 Senate Rethuglicans -- 70% of their Senate members -- voted against the amendment, and presumably for corporate interests in keeping sexual assaults on their employees from going public.
