In today’s news and commentary, the California Supreme Court rules on an arbitration agreement written in hard-to-read font, the Trump administration announces a new rule loosening civil service protections for some federal employees, and states modify affirmative action requirements for public contracting.

The California Supreme Court ruled Monday on a case involving an arbitration agreement written in hard-to-read font, per Law 360. In the case, an employee signed an agreement containing the arbitration provision as part of an employment application to a car dealership. The agreement was “nearly unreadable” due to small and blurry font, the Court writes. The employee challenged the agreement as unconscionable. The Court held that the contract’s small print speaks only to its procedural – not substantive – unconscionability, with both elements necessary to find the contract unconscionable. However, the Court also reversed the appellate court’s application of a “presumption in favor of arbitration” to find the agreement not substantively unconscionable, ultimately remanding the case to the trial court.

The Trump administration issued a new final rule yesterday that would loosen civil service protections for certain federal employees, Bloomberg reports. The rule authorizes agencies to reclassify positions into a new “Policy/Career” category. Reclassified positions would not have the right to appeal terminations or file whistleblower claims with the Office of Special Counsel (though the rule directs agencies to create in-house processes for hearing whistleblower claims, per the article). The final rule says “the President has concluded that policy resistance is a significant problem and that Schedule Policy/Career is needed to address it.” Officials with the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) said the new category applies to senior policymaking positions, per a Wall Street Journal article on the rule. Bloomberg reports agency heads have recommended reclassifying approximately 50,000 positions, or about 2% of the 2 million plus federal workforce. Different agencies may take different approaches – for example, Bloomberg notes that when a similar policy was first proposed in 2020, the NLRB proposed no reclassifications, while EPA proposed more than 500. Unions for federal employees and other advocacy groups said they would continue earlier lawsuits opposing the policy, which were paused pending the issuance of a final rule.

Several Republican-led states are modifying affirmative action requirements for public contracting, per another Bloomberg story. The article lists several examples, including Ohio, which last year repealed requirements for public contractors to report on affirmative action goals, and Tennessee, which ended collection of workforce data on women, racial and ethnic minorities, and other demographic groups. Legislation in other states would bar considering traits like race and gender in private sector hiring. The article notes some Democratic-led states are considering strengthening their state-level equal employment opportunity laws in response to the moves in other states and at the federal level.