Arbitration reform would prevent companies from forcing their customers or employees into binding mandatory arbitration agreements when they sign credit card, cell phone, nursing home, medical care or employment contracts. These agreements mean you can't go to court if you have a dispute, you have to go to a company-selected arbitration judge, someone who was neither elected nor selected by an elected representative, and be bound with no appeal to their decision. And I guarantee that you have signed at least one of these agreements.
Binding arbitration acts as a license for companies to shop for private judges in a parallel court system who depend on them for repeat business and a paycheck. If an arbitrator finds against their corporate customers they don't come back and they tell all their friends and they are done as an arbitration judge. There is effectively no appeal to the regular courts.
But it's really even a step farther. It's a license for judges on a corporate payroll to interpret and enforce laws (contracts) written by corporations. You step into a binding mandatory arbitration agreement, you might as well be living in the United States of AT&T, because the only point of the arbitration system is to protect corporate profit. Justice and individual rights hardly enter into it.
More of our social contract is covered by these agreements all the time. It's a quiet, private takeover of the function of the judiciary's role in consumer protection and employment agreements. It's a theft of democracy that excuses are made for because the courts are overburdened and underfunded; such is the story of all our public infrastructure.
A person's right to go to court shouldn't be something they're even allowed to give away before a dispute arises, in much the same way that people are not allowed to sell themselves into slavery or sell their votes. Even if they claim they really, really want to because they need the money, and it's not duress, honest. There are things that should never be for sale because it's wrong that someone could ask you to give them up when they have you at a disadvantage.
Indeed, maybe one of the Senators at the confirmation hearing can ask Gitenstein how he feels about the case of Jamie Leigh Jones, the Halliburton/KBR employee who was raped in Iraq, stuffed in a shipping container under guard to try keeping her quiet, and couldn't even sue for damages because of the arbitration agreement in her employment contract.
If he's in favor of this, Gitenstein shouldn't be anywhere near the Justice Department's strategic planning, nor the judicial hiring recommendations made by the OLP. |
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