In 1994, Congress passed the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA) with the intention of prohibiting employment discrimination against members of the military, as well as ensuring minimal disruption for service members and their families when they are called for service. In 2003, Congress revised and expanded the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Civil Relief Act of 1940, thus creating the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act (SCRA). The new law governs treatment of service members in rental agreements, evictions, credit card interest rates, mortgage interest rates, foreclosures, civil judicial proceedings, automobile leases, life insurance, health insurance, income tax payments, and more.
But forced-arbitration agreements inserted into many consumer and employment contracts circumvent those service member legal protections, undermining the very reasons those bills were passed. The result is that large corporations routinely fire service members, foreclose on their family homes, repossess their cars, scam their pensions, and even profit from life insurance policies after service members have been killed, according to a 2018 report by the American Association for Justice. In 2012, the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) found 15,000 instances of financial institutions failing to reduce mortgage interest rates for service members who qualified for an interest rate cap. And each year, GAO has determined that over 300 illegal…
