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MARCH 22, 2022
Meyerson on TAP
Ban Forced Arbitration? Overturn the Filibuster? Not Us!
The House bans it in all instances, along party lines, but it will go
nowhere in the Senate.
In February, there was a bit of to-do about Congress actually passing a
bill on a bipartisan basis. That bill, which had already passed the
Senate on a voice vote, banned employers from forbidding employees to
sue them in court for sexual abuse or harassment and compelling them
instead, as a condition of employment, to submit their charges to an
arbitration process in which employers tend to fare far better than they
do in court.
When this ban-on-forced-arbitration bill reached the House floor, it
received the same bipartisan support it had in the Senate. While all
House Democrats voted yes, so did 113 Republicans, while just 97 GOPniks
voted no.
That, however, was then.
Last Thursday, the House voted on a bill banning
**all**forced arbitration, not just in cases of sexual abuse. It
nullified employers' right to deny workers their day in court for any
other form of employer misconduct; it also nullified companies' right
to include forced arbitration clauses in their routine contracts with
consumers-which is why the very small print in the contracts consumers
sign for, say, cable, phone, or delivery services requires those
consumers to submit to forced arbitration, too.
In recent years, forced arbitration clauses have become standard in many
employment and consumer contracts. How many? In 2019, a study by the
Economic Policy Institute, the National Employment Law Project, and the
Center for Popular Democracy documented that more than half of American
workers were already bound to such contracts, and projected that if the
trend continued, fully 80 percent of U.S. workers would be bound by
those terms by 2024.
In 2019, California became the only state to ban forced arbitration in
all instances, a law that the Ninth Circuit Federal Appellate Court
upheld last September, though the worker-phobic U.S. Supreme Court may
not look so kindly on anything that actually restores worker rights.
Unionized workers, who are able to negotiate their terms of employment,
are not subjected to forced arbitration either-but only 6 percent of
the nation's private-sector workers are unionized.
When the House voted last Thursday, however, all but one of Republicans
who'd voted to ban the practice in cases of sexual harassment switched
sides.
The bill passed by a 222-to-209 margin
,
the yes side consisting entirely of Democrats and one lonely
Republican-Florida's Matt Gaetz. Gaetz, of course, is a charter
member of the Trumpian Far Right, but this is an issue on which he's
been compelled to go against what probably is his every instinct.
That's because he's under ongoing investigation for what's been
alleged to have been his role in a sex trafficking ring, so it was no
surprise that he voted with the GOP's one-day majority in favor of the
ban in cases of sexual abuse.
However, his vote encountered considerable ridicule from critics who
claimed he was clearly just covering his ass. Apparently, Gaetz
concluded that the best way to demonstrate that he really,
**really** opposed subjecting women to degrading treatment was to
support the overall ban on forced arbitration. He actually spoke on the
House floor in favor of the bill, making a compelling case. "When our
fellow Americans get a cellphone contract, when they get cable, they get
internet, they are subject to forced arbitration," he said. "People end
up getting really screwed in the process."
Indeed. Banning forced arbitration is actually a pretty easy case to
make. Now that the bill goes over to the Senate, however, it will be
immediately embalmed, not least because Sens. Manchin and Sinema won't
overturn the filibuster rule-one anti-democratic stricture riding to
the rescue of another.
~ HAROLD MEYERSON
Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter
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