The Non-Financial Ledger

Craig Stoker took a job at one of the most powerful private space companies on earth. He worked as a senior director, a title that is supposed to carry authority and institutional trust. He saw things that worried him. He said something. He kept saying something. And then, in October 2022, he was fired.

That sequence, speaking up and then losing your job, is designed to send a message to everyone watching. It is a warning. Everyone at Blue Origin who saw what happened to Stoker now knows the price of complaint.

But Blue Origin did not stop at terminating him. When Stoker went to court to fight back, the company immediately moved to drag him into a private arbitration proceeding, away from the public eye, before a single arbitrator it had helped to select, under rules it had written in its own employment contract. The message was clear: you will not have a jury. You will not be able to join other workers who suffered similar treatment. You will not even be able to argue this in open court. You will go to a private room, follow our process, and whatever happens there will be invisible to the public.

The courts refused to allow that. But the attempt itself reveals something true about how Blue Origin treats the people who work for it. The company spent legal resources not defending its conduct on the merits, but fighting to keep the whole thing private and procedurally trapped. That is what the worker who raised safety concerns was worth to Blue Origin: not an honest reckoning, but a motion to compel arbitration.

Legal Receipts

The following are verbatim quotes from the court record in Stoker v. Blue Origin, LLC (B344945). These are not summaries; they are the exact words used by Blue Origin’s own contract and by the court analyzing it.

“I understand and agree that all claims, disputes, or controversies relating to or arising out of my employment with the Company, except for the Excluded Claims listed below, shall be determined by binding arbitration before a single, neutral arbitrator.”

“The Company and I will resolve Claims only on an individual basis. This means that no Claims, including arbitration of Covered Claims or cause of action in court for Excluded Claims, will be initiated or maintained as a class action, collective action, consolidated action, representative action, or multi-party actions.”

“I understand and agree that this binding arbitration procedure shall supplant and replace claims brought in state or federal court (except as specified in this Section), and that the Company and I expressly waive the right to a civil court action before a jury. [¶] FURTHER, TO THE EXTENT THAT ANY CLAIM IS EXCLUDED FROM ARBITRATION UNDER THIS SECTION 6 AND/OR IS DETERMINED NOT TO BE SUBJECT TO ARBITRATION, THE COMPANY AND I EXPRESSLY AGREE THAT THE CLAIM SHALL BE TRIED TO THE COURT AND THAT ANY RIGHT TO JURY TRIAL IS WAIVED.”

“Baker represented that the employment agreement ‘contained “standard terms,” that “everyone has to sign to these terms,” and “everybody always signs to these terms.” ‘ Stoker asserted in his declaration that he had questions about the documents he was signing, but ‘Baker did not offer to answer any questions I had.’ “

“Although there are no bright-line numerical rules regarding severance, it is fair to say that the greater the number of unconscionable provisions a contract contains the less likely it is that severance will be the appropriate remedy.”

What Blue Origin Told Workers Versus What the Contract Actually Said

The arbitration agreement was presented to Stoker as a standard, neutral, mutual arrangement. The court’s analysis reveals that every element of that framing was false.

• Workers were told these were “standard terms” that everyone signed. In reality, the terms were drafted entirely by Blue Origin, were not negotiable, and contained multiple provisions that California courts have repeatedly found unenforceable.
• The agreement implied mutual arbitration by saying “the Company and I.” In reality, every claim a worker would bring (discrimination, harassment, retaliation, wage theft) went to arbitration, while every claim Blue Origin would bring (trade secrets, non-competes, proprietary information) was explicitly carved out and reserved for court.
• The agreement appeared to make a partial concession for sexual harassment and sexual assault claims by carving them out. In reality, those carve-outs were legally required by federal law (the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act of 2021) and could not have been included as mandatory arbitration anyway. Blue Origin was not granting workers a right; it was acknowledging a limit it had no choice but to acknowledge.
• The jury trial waiver appeared buried within the arbitration framework, making it seem like a technical procedural point. In reality, it stripped the right to a jury trial even for cases that were not arbitrated, a move the court called contrary to California public policy.

Profit-Maximization at All Costs

The design of Blue Origin’s arbitration agreement reflects a deliberate calculus: every structural choice in the contract transferred risk and cost from the corporation to the worker.

• By forcing individual arbitration and blocking class or representative lawsuits, Blue Origin ensured that any worker challenging a systemic practice would have to fight alone, with their own resources, against a company with a massive legal team. The cost of that fight deters most workers from ever starting it.
• The carve-out for Blue Origin’s most likely claims, trade secrets, proprietary information, non-solicitation agreements, preserved the company’s most powerful legal tools while eliminating workers’ most powerful procedural tools, specifically their ability to aggregate claims and share discovery costs.
• The waiver of jury trials, even for excluded claims, removed workers from the only decision-making body statistically more likely to find for plaintiffs in employment cases. A single arbitrator decides in private. There is no public record of the outcome and no precedent set.
• The court noted that allowing Blue Origin to simply sever its bad clauses after being challenged would “create an incentive for an employer to draft a one-sided arbitration agreement in the hope employees would not challenge the unlawful provisions.” The contract’s design treats legal noncompliance as a low-risk gamble: if no one sues, you keep all the advantages; if someone does sue, you lose only the specific clauses, not the whole arrangement.

Legal Minimalism: The Letter but Not the Spirit

Blue Origin structured its arbitration agreement to technically acknowledge legal limits while systematically stripping workers of the protections those limits were designed to provide.

• The contract excluded sexual harassment and sexual assault claims from mandatory arbitration. The federal Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act of 2021 (9 U.S.C. § 402) requires this. Blue Origin complied with the letter of the statute while maintaining its broader arbitration architecture, which meant workers retained that one right while losing most others, including class and representative claims, jury trials, and the ability to bring unrelated claims in court.
• The contract included a severance clause, which is standard legal practice. The California Court of Appeal, citing the California Supreme Court’s ruling in Ramirez v. Charter Communications, ruled that a severance clause cannot be used to “dictate the outcome” when severing would not serve the interests of justice. Blue Origin attempted to use the clause as a safety net against judicial voiding of the entire agreement.
• The class action waiver relied on AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion (2011), the U.S. Supreme Court case that allowed class action waivers in arbitration agreements under the Federal Arbitration Act. Blue Origin’s contract extended that waiver beyond arbitration to court proceedings as well. California courts have ruled that waiver does not reach PAGA representative actions under state law. Blue Origin applied the waiver anyway.

How the Contract Sorted Claims by Who Benefits

The arbitration agreement was structured to send worker-initiated claims into a private forum while preserving employer-initiated claims for the public courts. The following diagram shows that sorting mechanism as the court documented it.

Societal Impact Mapping

Public Health and Workplace Safety

Stoker’s case illustrates how forced arbitration directly suppresses safety reporting at corporations with high-risk operations.

• Stoker was terminated in October 2022 after making repeated complaints about the company’s safety practices at a company that builds rockets, engines, and spacecraft. Private arbitration contracts serve as a structural deterrent: workers who know that complaints may lead to termination, and that termination will be handled in a private, costly, non-collective forum, have less incentive to report safety problems.
• When safety complaints are suppressed through employment structures at aerospace and defense companies, the downstream risk is not abstract. Rockets and spacecraft carry crew and affect public airspace. The chilling effect on internal safety reporting has potential consequences beyond any individual worker’s career.
• The Private Attorneys General Act, which Blue Origin attempted to waive entirely, is specifically designed to allow California workers to act as private attorneys general enforcing labor law on behalf of the state. Eliminating that mechanism removes a layer of public accountability for workplace conditions.

Economic Inequality

Forced arbitration agreements are a direct mechanism of economic power transfer from workers to corporations.

• The individual arbitration requirement means every worker who is harmed must bear the full cost of litigation alone, while the corporation amortizes its legal costs across a permanent legal and HR infrastructure. The economic asymmetry is built into the system by design.
• Class and representative action waivers prevent workers from aggregating small-dollar claims that are economically rational to fight collectively but not individually. If a company underpays a thousand workers by a few hundred dollars each, individual arbitration ensures almost none of them will fight it, even if the employer violated the law.
• The court noted that even highly compensated employees in managerial roles, such as a vice president of business development cited in precedent cases, have been found to be subject to adhesive contracts when they had no real opportunity to negotiate the arbitration provision. Seniority and compensation do not protect workers from take-it-or-leave-it contract terms.
• By requiring all disputes to be resolved in Washington state under Washington law, Blue Origin added a further barrier for California workers: to challenge a California employment relationship, a worker would potentially need to navigate a different state’s legal framework, adding cost and complexity.

The Settlement Isn’t Justice

The court’s ruling in this case voided Blue Origin’s arbitration agreement. That is a legal victory for Stoker and a meaningful precedent for California workers. It is worth being precise about what it is and is not.

• The ruling voided the arbitration agreement. It did not resolve the underlying claims: retaliation, gender discrimination, gender harassment, wrongful termination, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Those cases still have to be tried. Stoker’s fight is not over.
• The ruling applies to this case. Other Blue Origin employees who signed the same or similar agreements in other states, or in jurisdictions with different unconscionability standards, may not have the same legal protection. Federal law (the Federal Arbitration Act) preempts state unconscionability law in some circumstances.
• There is no documented fine, penalty, or financial consequence to Blue Origin for having drafted and enforced this agreement. The company’s cost was litigation over the motion to compel arbitration. If Stoker had not sued, and if the court had not affirmed the unconscionability ruling, every other worker who signed this agreement would still be bound by it.
• The court explicitly declined to incentivize further overreach by simply severing the bad clauses. But there is no structural deterrent preventing another company from drafting a similarly one-sided agreement, deploying it for years, and then litigating clause by clause only when challenged. The risk calculation for employers remains favorable.

This Is the System Working as Intended

The Blue Origin arbitration case is not a story about a rogue contract. It is a story about a widely available corporate tool being deployed exactly as it was designed to be deployed.

• The Federal Arbitration Act, originally passed in 1925 to govern commercial disputes between merchants, has been interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court to apply to consumer and employment contracts. The 2011 AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion decision specifically blessed class action waivers in these contracts. Blue Origin’s agreement is a direct product of that legal architecture.
• Every element the court found unconscionable, the overbroad scope, the one-sided exclusions, the jury waiver, the PAGA waiver, is a standard feature of employer-drafted arbitration agreements. The court cited cases involving USC, Charter Communications, Amgen, and others as comparators, indicating this is an industry-wide practice, not a Blue Origin anomaly.
• Stoker was able to fight this agreement because he had the resources and legal representation to mount a multi-year challenge through the trial court and the appeals court. The vast majority of workers who sign these agreements never challenge them. The system’s function is to make challenge prohibitively costly for most people and reserve the right to litigate for the party with structural economic advantages.
• The recruiter told Stoker these were “standard terms” and “everybody always signs.” That framing is accurate and also the mechanism. When a practice is universal, the social and economic cost of refusing feels prohibitive. The standard itself is the coercion.

What a Legitimate Fix Looks Like

The following is editorial analysis based on the documented failure modes in this case. These are recommendations, not findings of the source document.

The core structural failure this case exposes: the Federal Arbitration Act, as currently interpreted, allows employers to compel individual arbitration of employment disputes and prohibit class action lawsuits as a condition of taking a job. State unconscionability law provides a partial check, but only after years of litigation by workers who can afford to fight.

• The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the Department of Labor, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) should audit the arbitration agreements of federal contractors and large employers for compliance with California-style mutuality and scope requirements. Companies receiving federal contracts should not be permitted to use unenforceable adhesion agreements against their workers as a condition of funding.
• The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) should aggressively enforce existing protections for concerted activity against arbitration agreements that strip workers of the ability to act collectively, even under the current legal landscape.
• California’s Labor Commissioner and the Department of Fair Employment and Housing should establish a public registry of arbitration agreements filed or enforced in California employment contexts, so workers can see the terms before signing.

• Congress should pass legislation extending the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act (which this case partly involves) to cover all civil rights employment claims, including race, national origin, disability, age, and retaliation claims. The precedent for categorical exclusions from mandatory arbitration is already established in federal law.
• Legislation should prohibit pre-dispute jury trial waivers in employment contracts as a matter of federal law, not just California public policy. The right to a jury trial is a constitutional guarantee. It should not be waivable as a condition of employment before any dispute arises.
• The PAGA model, which allows workers to bring representative enforcement actions on behalf of the state, should be adopted at the federal level for wage and hour, discrimination, and retaliation claims. Stripping workers of the ability to bring representative actions removes a critical enforcement mechanism for labor law that regulators alone cannot fill.

• Blue Origin’s board of directors should commission an independent review of all employment agreements currently in force across the company’s workforce in all jurisdictions, specifically to identify provisions that would fail California’s unconscionability test. Workers currently employed under those agreements deserve notice.
• Blue Origin should adopt a policy that any arbitration agreement offered to employees is genuinely bilateral: any claim the company can bring in court, the employee can also bring in court. The court’s core finding in this case is that the one-sided exclusion structure is what made the agreement unconscionable. Fixing it requires symmetry, not just clause deletion.
• Executive compensation structures at Blue Origin and similar aerospace companies should not reward legal departments or HR leadership for the successful deployment of arbitration agreements that reduce litigation costs. Incentivizing the suppression of worker claims through procedural architecture is a governance failure, not a cost-saving achievement.

What Now?

The company responsible for this agreement is Blue Origin, LLC. The agreement was enforced by its human resources and legal departments. The decision to appeal the trial court’s ruling was made by Blue Origin’s leadership and its legal counsel at Davis Wright Tremaine.

If you are a Blue Origin employee and you signed an employment agreement as a condition of being hired, you should have an employment attorney in your jurisdiction review that agreement. The ruling in this case is California precedent. Other states may apply different standards.

Regulatory Watchlist

• Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC): accepts complaints of employment discrimination, retaliation, and harassment. File at eeoc.gov.
• California Civil Rights Department (formerly DFEH): accepts FEHA complaints for California workers. File at calcivilrights.ca.gov.
• National Labor Relations Board (NLRB): accepts charges related to interference with concerted worker activity, including retaliation for workplace complaints. File at nlrb.gov.
• Department of Labor (DOL) Wage and Hour Division: accepts complaints about wage and hour violations, including those that arbitration agreements are designed to prevent workers from aggregating. File at dol.gov.
• California Labor Commissioner’s Office: accepts PAGA notices and wage claim complaints for California workers. File at dir.ca.gov.
• Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB): monitors and reports on arbitration in consumer and employment contexts. Report experiences with mandatory arbitration at consumerfinance.gov.

Organizing and Mutual Aid

• If you work in the aerospace or tech industry and want to understand your rights around forced arbitration, the National Employment Law Project (NELP) publishes plain-language guides on arbitration agreements and worker rights at nelp.org.
• Connect with local workers’ centers in your city. Workers’ centers provide free legal intake, know-your-rights trainings, and connections to employment attorneys who work on contingency for discrimination and retaliation cases.
• Share this case with coworkers. The most powerful thing a single court ruling can do is inform the people whose lives it directly affects. If you signed a similar agreement and did not know what it contained, you are not alone. The recruiter’s line was designed to make you feel like questioning was pointless. It was not.
• Contact your state and federal representatives and ask specifically about the Ending Forced Arbitration Act’s current scope, and whether your representative supports extending it to cover all civil rights employment claims. Legislative action on this issue has stalled repeatedly. Constituent contact moves it.