Arbitration Contracts and Business Class Citizenship

by: Natasha Chart

Fri Jul 31, 2009 at 20:15

"Without access to lawyers, the law doesn't apply to you." - Ian Millhiser

I've flown business class a couple times, it was nice.

You get to board the plane early, have a comfortable seat, enjoy free drinks. Nice. And it's fine, they pay extra for that. The airlines make a reasonable calculation about how much they're owed for providing those services and they get compensated.

Yet when it comes to dealing with the rest of society, their workers, customers and government, business interests always want to dispute the bill for services rendered. If the law says otherwise, heck, they can get Congress to write laws they like better.

They can also directly write their own laws. And by laws, I mean contracts. Privately drawn up agreements that will be enforced by the courts or an arbitrator whose judgments are considered binding by the courts.

When unions, groups of employees rather than groups of executives, want to do the same thing, it's somehow an outrage. Or so it seems from this AP article about the fight over mandatory arbitration for union contracts.