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Today, when you sign up with your phone carrier or cable company, the fine print of the contract includes provisions for an arbitration process.
Earlier today, the House Judiciary Committee began its consideration of one bill that is extremely necessary and should also be extremely popular. The bill would ban corporations from imposing forced arbitration on their customers and workers.
Today, when you sign up with your phone carrier or cable company or delivery service or damn near whatever, the fine print of the contract reads that if you have a grievance against that company, you must waive your right to go to court and must settle instead for an arbitration process—a process in which the company invariably holds the upper hand. If you don’t want to do that, you’ll have to find another company that provides comparable services, and that doesn’t impose arbitration on its customers. Good luck with that.
Same goes for employees: If you want a job at company X, you must accept its arbitration process and forgo your right to go to court.
Not every corporation imposes such agreements, of course, but most of the big ones do. For employers, such agreements amount to a double whammy against their workers. By intimidating its workers, the typical corporation generally blocks its employees’ efforts to unionize, and forced arbitration blocks their recourse to the justice system. This tends to lower workers’ voice in any of the actions that companies take that affect workers to something a good deal fainter than a whisper.
The categories of people hurt by forced arbitration include—well, include damn near everyone: women who’ve been sexually harassed, workers who’ve been injured or abused on the job, people whose phone or cable service has been deficient, and on and on and on. That’s why a number of states have banned the practice.
Now that Democrats control Congress and the White House, they’re likely to ban the practice, too. Republicans traditionally complain that such action amounts to a gift to trial lawyers, but if they really choose to stand and fight on this ground, they’ll be handing the Democrats an election-time gift, if the Democrats have the sense to use it.
The one way the pro-corporate right could block this bill is to have the conservative justices on the Supreme Court overturn such a ban on forced arbitration. As the Court’s conservative majority has blocked earlier efforts to curtail forced arbitration, the current bill is designed to make yet another blockage very difficult. Given the extent to which the pro-corporate Six on the Court will move heaven and earth to beat down workers and consumers, however, a Supreme success for forced-arb opponents cannot be guaranteed. That, of course, could also make the Court more of an issue in coming elections—again, if Democrats have the wit and will to make it so.
