Shiny Lal is a nurse who came to the U.S. from India at the peak of the COVID-19 epidemic. In a new country facing an unprecedented virus, she dedicated herself to the difficult, dangerous work of front-line caregiving to create a better life for her family. But it wasn’t long before her American dream turned into a nightmare. Her employer, MedPro Healthcare Staffing, is among the growing number of companies that force employees to sign “stay-or-pay” contracts. These agreements impose exorbitant fees – routinely in the tens of thousands of dollars – under the guise of recouping training and relocation expenses if a worker leaves their job too soon. In Shiny’s case, the penalty – up to $40,000 plus MedPro’s enforcement costs – was triggered if she spent fewer than three years working for the company.

MedPro placed Shiny in a small-town hospital in Kentucky where she was underpaid and struggled with an abusive supervisor. Shiny begged MedPro for a reassignment, but nothing changed. After enduring months of unbearable working conditions, Shiny resigned, hoping for a fresh start. But MedPro came after her, as it has pursued other former employees. MedPro filed a complaint against Shiny with the American Arbitration Association (AAA), the world’s largest private dispute resolution company. Without hearing Shiny’s side of the story, the AAA arbitrator rubber-stamped MedPro’s request for almost $36,000 in damages and penalties. Shiny only learned about the ruling many months later when MedPro sued to collect the judgment.

Shiny is far from the only one who has faced the devastating impact of stay-or-pay contracts. According to one estimate, employers use these contracts in an array of fields, including health care, trucking, education, and aviation. Combined, these industries employ 52 million people, or one-third of all U.S. workers. Employers typically use arbitration, a dispute resolution process where a private third party makes a binding decision on a dispute between two parties, to enforce these agreements, which the U.S. Department of Labor, the National Labor Relations Board, and several courts have been found to violate federal and state labor statutes and human trafficking laws.

Women – particularly immigrant women – and workers of color disproportionately hold the low-wage jobs where stay-or-pay contracts are most common, and disproportionately suffer the consequences of what is both a workers’ rights issue and a civil rights issue. Indeed, it isn’t an overstatement to call stay-or-pay contracts a form of indentured servitude where workers are forced to remain in substandard working conditions unless they are willing to risk financial ruin.

Today, the ACLU Women’s Rights Project and Towards Justice, along with 12 organizations called on the AAA to stop helping abusive employers enforce stay-or-pay contracts against their workers by refusing to accept such cases.

To understand just how harmful these contracts can be, the ACLU recently spoke with Shiny about her experience fighting the AAA ruling to free herself from this abusive contract and so she can return to the care-work that brought her to the states. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

ACLU: What inspired you to pursue a nursing career in the U.S.? What was your experience like moving and adapting to life here?

SHINY: I first filed to come to the U.S. in 2007 and had to wait 14 years for my application to be approved. It was a long-term dream of mine to be a nurse in a foreign country that had more modern equipment and better facilities. When I did calculations to convert my salary in dollars to rupees, it looked like I would be making good money. My husband, my children and I left everything we had in India to chase the American dream.

MedPro placed me at a hospital that was very remote and had no public transportation. I didn’t have a car or a driver’s license and I had to walk two miles in either direction to work and depend on neighbors to bring us groceries. Eventually I found a better apartment and purchased a second-hand car, but those expenses took up a lot of my salary. My husband couldn’t find a job, and my daughter couldn’t attend college because no one could travel anywhere. It was isolating and scary.

I asked for a different placement where I could have more resources and community, but MedPro knew they didn’t have to accommodate me because leaving the job could ruin me.

ACLU: Before signing, what was your understanding of the “stay or pay” contracts?

SHINY: I knew there would be a penalty for leaving my MedPro job before I’d worked there for three years, but I never imagined I would leave. I thought those three years would go by fast, and that life in the U.S. would be much better than it had been in India. It was only once it was too late that I understood how the contract opened me up to being mistreated by my employer and kept me stuck in a situation that I didn’t feel like I could get out of.

ACLU: How was your job with MedPro different from your expectations?

SHINY: MedPro contracted me to the hospital as a travel nurse, who often gets the hardest assignments in exchange for higher pay, so I was expected to deal with the most difficult patients. But I was earning less than the other staff nurses, not more, and had a hard time adjusting to a new medical system without any sort of guidance.

Soon after I started working, my supervisor began to treat me worse than other nurses, refusing to train me and blaming me for mistakes I hadn’t made. MedPro kept promising that I could switch supervisors, but nothing changed.

ACLU: What ultimately led you to resign your position with MedPro?

SHINY: After several weeks of repeated complaints, I was just told to quit. For a few months, I was forced to survive on a stipend of $350 per week while I waited for another placement, which was so low that I had to start borrowing money from friends to meet my family’s most basic needs. My husband ended up getting ill and had to return to India to receive care, leaving me alone with our two children. Looking back, I can’t imagine how I got through that time. I didn’t know what to do and nobody was there to help me.

After a few months, MedPro placed me at another job, but my debts were piling up. I would be in debt whether I stayed or quit, but if I found a new job with better pay, at least I could start to work my way out of it. So I gave notice to MedPro that I was resigning.

ACLU: How did you feel when you first found out about the AAA arbitration proceedings and the amount you were being asked to pay?

SHINY: After I gave notice, MedPro demanded that I pay them $26,666.68. I was shocked by how high that amount was, especially knowing how much money they had already made off my work. They were charging the hospital $150 an hour, and I was only earning $27 of that. I tried to negotiate, offering to pay $10,000, but they refused anything less than the full amount.

After I realized that I wasn’t getting anywhere, I stopped responding to their emails. I didn’t have the money to pay them and I didn’t have the money to pay a lawyer to represent me against them, so it felt like there was nothing I could do.

ACLU: What happens next with your case?

SHINY: Although I wasn’t aware that the arbitration was happening, the arbitrator entered an award against me for $36,592.87. This amount included $12,000 in damages paid to MedPro for the recruiter who I worked with in India, more than $20,000 for my orientation, and around $6,500 for something called “cost of capital,” prorated based on how much time I worked. It also included around $6,500 in interest and $3,500 to cover MedPro’s attorney fees. .

For a year after the award, I didn’t hear anything from MedPro, but in October 2024 I was served with a lawsuit they filed to get a court to confirm the arbitration award. The nonprofit Towards Justice had helped me file a charge with the National Labor Relations Board, but I’m still waiting for a resolution, and I can’t afford a lawyer to defend me against MedPro’s case in court. I am scared that MedPro will get a judgment against me, and I feel hopeless about defending myself.

ACLU: How has this contract and lawsuit impacted your life?

SHINY: I’ve found a new job in a totally different environment that’s much more relaxed and supportive, and I’m finally able to live the life I came here for. My husband’s health improved and he was able to move back to the United States, so my family has been reunited. But I still have the lawsuit hanging over my head, and paying the debt is still impossible. I don’t want all of the work I’ve done towards the American Dream to fall apart. I didn’t understand how easy it was to take away my rights, and how powerless I would be to provide for my family.

Last Spring, protests related to the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict engulfed universities across the country, with students and faculty weighing in on both sides of the issue. The ACLU expressed its strong opposition to any efforts to stifle free speech and association on college campuses.

During student protests at Columbia University in April 2024, the Columbia chapter of the American Association of University Professors (Columbia-AAUP), an organization of Columbia University faculty, issued a public statement condemning the school’s punitive response to students protesting the war in Gaza. The statement minced no words, describing then-President Minouche Shafik’s unilateral decision to authorize the NYPD to arrest student protestors as “a grotesque violation of norms of shared governance.” It described Shafik as “inaugurating a new era at Columbia,” marked by “repressed speech, political restrictions on academic inquiry, and punitive discipline against the University’s own students and faculty.” Columbia-AAUP, whose mission is to protect academic freedom and advocate for faculty and students, pledged to provide “continued support for our students’ right to protest and to speak freely, and for our colleagues’ right to teach and to write freely within their domains of expertise.”

Two months later, five current and former Columbia students filed a civil lawsuit in New York against Columbia AAUP in response to this and similar statements. The lawsuit names 21 people and organizations — including Columbia students and faculty, student organizations, the UAW, and three members of Congress — who publicly protested the war in Gaza or who made public statements in support of student protestors.

On behalf of Columbia-AAUP, the ACLU and the civil rights firm Wang Hecker LLP filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit and to order the plaintiffs to pay our client’s legal fees. We argue that the lawsuit is a clear example of a SLAPP, or “Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation.” These cases weaponize our legal system to punish and silence constitutionally-protected speech.

SLAPP lawsuits have become a common tool for intimidating and silencing criticism—including from whistleblowers, journalists, and political protestors. The real goal of a SLAPP suit is not necessarily to win in court, but to entangle people in expensive litigation, using the prospect of mounting legal fees and a potentially ruinous financial penalty to chill speech. In other words, to bully people into silence.

The plaintiffs claim that because Columbia-AAUP spoke in support of student protestors, it somehow injured them by causing Columbia University to move classes online, restrict campus access, and cancel commencement. The plaintiffs have sued Columbia-AAUP for purported monetary and punitive damages resulting from Columbia University’s actions.

If this feels like a logical leap, that's because it is.

Fortunately, New York State—along with 33 other states and the District of Columbia—has an “anti-SLAPP” law specifically designed to protect those whose speech is targeted by such meritless lawsuits. Under New York’s law, a defendant may quickly move to dismiss a lawsuit based on public speech in connection with any issue of public interest—like a statement from professors about the treatment of student protesters on their campus. In a typical civil lawsuit, the defendant must prove that the case has no legal basis in order to dismiss it at the outset. By contrast, the anti-SLAPP law shifts the burden to the plaintiff to prove that there is a “substantial basis” for the claims. If the plaintiff cannot meet this burden, the court must not only dismiss the case, but also order the plaintiff to pay the defendant’s attorney’s fees. The purpose of the fee award is to ensure the defendant is not left with a hefty financial burden simply from fighting off a frivolous case and to dissuade others from filing such lawsuits in the future.

Columbia-AAUP’s case is exactly the type of lawsuit anti-SLAPP laws are designed to quickly dismiss and deter. The allegations against Columbia-AAUP focus exclusively on public statements that the faculty organization made in support of students’ rights to free speech and criticizing Columbia’s crackdown, including using the NYPD, on protesting students. These are issues of clear public interest; indeed, they have captured national attention. And it is clear there is no “substantial basis” for holding Columbia-AAUP liable for this speech, when there is no plausible connection between Columbia-AAUP’s words and Columbia University’s reaction to the student protestors.

Throughout American history, students have participated in and benefited from the marketplace of ideas on college campuses, particularly with respect to pressing and divisive social and political issues. Columbia University itself has frequently been a site of vibrant student protest, including with respect to the Vietnam War, South African Apartheid, and climate change. In this case, the unnamed plaintiffs are free to disagree with the student protestors’ message and those who defended their rights to free speech, but they cannot hold them legally liable for engaging in the rich tradition of dissent that characterizes American campuses.

At the ACLU, we won’t stand for SLAPP lawsuits that imperil this historic tradition and threaten the First Amendment rights of future generations of students, professors, and activists. New York’s anti-SLAPP law, and the First Amendment, clearly protect Columbia-AAUP’s speech–and we are confident that the court will send a clear message that New York will not allow abuse of the legal system to silence viewpoints simply because some people don’t like them.