Arbitration epidemic deprives workers and consumers of their rights, Supreme Court has engineered a massive shift in the civil justice system, Enabled large corporations to force customers and employees into arbitration to adjudicate practically all types of violations of laws designed to protect citizens against consumer fraud unsafe products employment discrimination etc. and other forms of corporate wrongdoing

From the Economic Policy Institute December 7, 2015.

“The arbitration epidemic

Mandatory arbitration deprives workers and consumers of their rights”

“Executive summary

In the past three decades, the Supreme Court has engineered a massive shift in the civil justice system that is having dire consequences for consumers and employees. The Court has enabled large corporations to force customers and employees into arbitration to adjudicate practically all types of alleged violations of countless state and federal laws designed to protect citizens against consumer fraud, unsafe products, employment discrimination, nonpayment of wages, and other forms of corporate wrongdoing. By delegating dispute resolution to arbitration, the Court now permits corporations to write the rules that will govern their relationships with their workers and customers and design the procedures used to interpret and apply those rules when disputes arise. Moreover, the Court permits corporations to couple mandatory arbitration with a ban on class actions, thereby preventing consumers or employees from joining together to challenge systemic corporate wrongdoing. As one judge opined, these trends give corporations a “get out of jail free” card for all potential transgressions. These trends are undermining decades of progress in consumer and labor rights.

This report tracks these developments and presents the most recent research findings, summarized here:

• It is common for employees to be presented with terms of employment that include both a clause that obligates them to arbitrate all disputes they might have with their employer and one that prohibits them from pursuing their claims in a class or collective action in court.
• Employees subject to mandatory arbitration can no longer sue for violations of many important employment laws, including rights to minimum wages and overtime pay, rest breaks, protections against discrimination and unjust dismissal, privacy protection, family leave, and a host of other state and federal employment rights.
• On average, employees and consumers win less often and receive much lower damages in arbitration than they do in court.
• Employers tend to win cases more often when they appear before the same arbitrator in multiple cases, indicating that they have a repeat-player advantage over employees from regular involvement in arbitration.

Introduction: The problem

Over the past 25 years, it has become increasingly commonplace for corporations to insert arbitration clauses into their contracts with customers and employees. These clauses appear to be innocuous, or even beneficial, to consumers and employees, but they pack a powerful punch. They prevent customers and employees from going to court if they have a dispute. Instead, when there is an arbitration clause, consumers and employees are required to take their complaints to a privatized, invisible, and often inferior forum in which they are less likely to prevail—and if they do, they are less likely to recover their due. Moreover, once a dispute is decided by an arbitrator, there is no effective right of appeal.”

“The Court has also further cut back on the ability of consumers and employees to avoid arbitration on the grounds that a contract is illegal, unconscionable, or otherwise not enforceable. One might think that if a contract is unenforceable, a party cannot be required to arbitrate under it because the arbitration clause is part of the unenforceable contract. That was the law until 1967. But in 1967 the Supreme Court held, in Prima Paint Corp. v. Flood & Conklin Mfg. Co., 388 U.S. 395, that when a party claimed that a contract it had signed was induced by fraud, that party had to assert its claim in arbitration. That is, even if the entire contract (in that case, a commercial lease) was invalid, the arbitration clause survived because, the Court found, the promise to arbitrate was separable from the rest of the contract. This holding is called the “separability doctrine.”

In 2006, the Supreme Court in Buckeye Check Cashing, Inc. v. Cardegna, 546 U.S. 440, extended the separability doctrine to illegal contracts, even though doing so meant that a party had to arbitrate an alleged violation even when the underlying contract that contained the arbitration agreement was entirely void. The only exception the Court recognized was when a party claimed that there was illegality, fraud, or some other recognized contractual defense in the arbitration clause itself.

One of the most frequently raised objections to arbitration clauses is that they are unconscionable. Unconscionability is a well-established contract-law doctrine that says that when a contract is grossly unfair in its terms and/or in the manner in which it was procured, it will not be enforced.”

“Employee win rates in mandatory arbitration are much lower than in either federal court or state court, with employees in mandatory arbitration winning only just about a fifth of the time (21.4 percent), which is 59 percent as often as in the federal courts and only 38 percent as often as in state courts. Differences in damages awarded are even greater, with the median or typical award in mandatory arbitration being only 21 percent of the median award in the federal courts and 43 percent of the median award in the state courts. The most comprehensive comparison comes when we look at the mean or average amount recovered in damages across all cases, including those in which the employee loses and zero damages are awarded. When we make this comparison, we find that the average outcome in mandatory arbitration is only 16 percent of that in the federal courts and 7 percent of that in state courts. ”

“Impact of arbitration on workers’ access to justice and ability to get attorneys

The mandatory arbitration–litigation gap in outcomes has a direct effect on the ability of individual workers to recover compensation for the injuries they have suffered. The gap also reduces the liability exposure of corporations that adopt mandatory arbitration. However, equally important, the mandatory arbitration–litigation gap has a major impact on the ability of workers to make claims in the first place.”

“In surveying plaintiffs’ attorneys about their likelihood of accepting potential cases, Colvin and Gough found just such an effect. Whereas on average plaintiffs’ attorneys accepted 15.8 percent of potential cases involving employees who could go to litigation, they accepted about half as many, 8.1 percent, of the potential cases of employees covered by mandatory arbitration. Thus, in addition to producing worse case outcomes than litigation, mandatory arbitration also reduces the likelihood of obtaining the legal representation that will help employees bring a claim in the first place.”

“Do we find repeat-player advantages in the outcomes of mandatory arbitration cases? In a study of 2,802 mandatory employment arbitration cases decided between 2003 and 2014, Colvin, one of the authors of this report, and Gough looked at the relationship between numbers of cases involving the same employer and outcomes.58 They initially found that as employers were involved in more cases they tended to win more of these cases. This is not surprising and could arise from a range of factors, such as larger employers having better lawyers, more sophisticated human resource (HR) departments, and better internal systems for dealing with workplace conflicts. However, once they controlled for the number of cases involving the employer, they also found a significant effect for the number of cases in which the employer appeared before the same arbitrator. More specifically, the first time an employer appeared before an arbitrator, the employee had a 17.9 percent chance of winning, but after the employer had four cases before the same arbitrator the employee’s chance of winning dropped to 15.3 percent, and after 25 cases before the same arbitrator the employee’s chance of winning dropped to only 4.5 percent.”

Read More:

https://www.epi.org/publication/the-arbitration-epidemic/