Back in college, I took an arbitration class, and it was one of my favorite classes. The professor (James Gross, who just retired last year after teaching for an astounding 56 years) was amazing, and I became a little obsessed with the entire idea and process of arbitration as an alternative to the costly and much more time intensive court process. However, lots of big businesses became obsessed with the concept as well, and, as we’ve covered over the years, that’s resulted in them spending much of the early 2000s turning the system to their advantage.
First, they built in arbitration clauses to agreements that effectively blocked certain types of lawsuits with “binding” arbitration, which the Supreme Court said was fine. Then they said that unalterable “click-wrap” agreements with binding arbitration clauses could take away your rights to go to court. And the people studying arbitration results quickly learned that the businesses quite frequently win any arbitration claim, in part because the company is the one hiring the arbitrator, and if they side against the company too often, guess who isn’t getting hired again later?
So, forced arbitration agreements, for a while, turned into a method for big companies to screw over customers, users, employees and more.
But… over the last few years, we’ve been highlighting how people have started to fight back against the companies who forced arbitration on them by flooding them with arbitration...
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