WSJ Law Blog notices that arbitration is one-sided
Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal’s Law blog posted a story about Deanna Richert, a former manager and the National Arbitration Forum, who is suing her former employer. Among allegations of sex and age discrimination (read the complaint here), she also alleges that the NAF "fraudulently favored regular business clients" and that in-house these repeat clients were referred to as "Famous Parties."
According to Richert’s complaint, NAF (among other things) instructed arbitrators to change their decisions in cases where they decided against the Famous Parties and ensured that arbitrators who ruled against the Famous Parties did not receive more cases. NAF, naturally, denies the whole thing.
This really should be more shocking, but these sort of revelations are sadly nothing new. Public Citizen analyzed the success big, corporate repeat customers had in arbitration, and even Business Week documented the troubles consumers had in forced arbitration.
This just contributes to the preponderance of evidence showing that forced arbitration is just a way for big business to shake down consumers and avoid accountability for the things they’ve done. Help us pass the Arbitration Fairness Act and put an end to this deceptive practice once and for all: sign the petition, write your Representative, or tell a friend.