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**FEBRUARY 11, 2021**

Meyerson on TAP

Can the Democrats Outlaw Forced Arbitration?

Earlier today, the House Judiciary Committee began its consideration of
one bill that is extremely necessary and should also be extremely
popular. The bill would ban corporations from imposing forced
arbitration on their customers and workers.

Today, when you sign up with your phone carrier or cable company or
delivery service or damn near whatever, the fine print of the contract
reads that if you have a grievance against that company, you must waive
your right to go to court and must settle instead for an arbitration
process-a process in which the company invariably holds the upper
hand. If you don't want to do that, you'll have to find another
company that provides comparable services, and that doesn't impose
arbitration on its customers. Good luck with that.

Same goes for employees: If you want a job at company X, you must accept
its arbitration process and forgo your right to go to court.

Not every corporation imposes such agreements, of course, but most of
the big ones do. For employers, such agreements amount to a double
whammy against their workers. By intimidating its workers, the typical
corporation generally blocks its employees' efforts to unionize, and
forced arbitration blocks their recourse to the justice system. This
tends to lower workers' voice in any of the actions that companies
take that affect workers to something a good deal fainter than a
whisper.

The categories of people hurt by forced arbitration include-well,
include damn near everyone: women who've been sexually harassed,
workers who've been injured or abused on the job, people whose phone
or cable service has been deficient, and on and on and on. That's why
a number of states have banned the practice.

Now that Democrats control Congress and the White House, they're
likely to ban the practice, too. Republicans traditionally complain that
such action amounts to a gift to trial lawyers, but if they really
choose to stand and fight on this ground, they'll be handing the
Democrats an election-time gift, if the Democrats have the sense to use
it.

The one way the pro-corporate right could block this bill is to have the
conservative justices on the Supreme Court overturn such a ban on forced
arbitration. As the Court's conservative majority has blocked earlier
efforts to curtail forced arbitration, the current bill is designed to
make yet another blockage very difficult. Given the extent to which the
pro-corporate Six on the Court will move heaven and earth to beat down
workers and consumers, however, a Supreme success for forced-arb
opponents cannot be guaranteed. That, of course, could also make the
Court more of an issue in coming elections-again, if Democrats have
the wit and will to make it so.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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