Supreme Court: AT&T Can Force Arbitration

suraj.sun writes with this unhappy news, as reported by Ars Technica: "The Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that AT&T — and indeed, any company — could block class-action suits arising from disputes with customers and instead force those customers into binding arbitration. The ruling reverses previous lower-court decisions that classified stipulations in AT&T's service contract which barred class arbitration as 'unconscionable.' ... In cases where an unfair practice affects large numbers of customers, AT&T or other companies could quietly settle a few individual claims instead of being faced with larger class-action settlements which might include punitive awards designed to discourage future bad practices."

Comments

Now imagine that...

[GodInHell]

McDonalds requires every employee to sign away class action rights -- boom, they can nick a buck off each employee every day and it will never be worth an individual suit. They can just fire you as the total from you approaches the cost of filing your claim.

Add in Walmart and all the other chain stores and shady dealers. This ruling was NOT limited to consumer cases.

-GiH

(Yes, IAAL)

Re:Lawyers

[jd]

The problem is that the contract prohibits private lawsuits. So, if AT&T "forces" you to go the individual route, they are then entitled to have the case thrown out as a contract violation. The supreme court only ruled that AT&T could force individual arbitration, it said nothing about AT&T then having to allow said arbitration to proceed.

Re:Wonderful, just wonderful

[MaskedSlacker]

I have trouble understanding how a black man can support the Party that opposed the abolition of slavery and created the Ku Klux Klan.

You might want to crack open a history book sometime. Lincoln was a Republican. The Republican party was founded as an abolitionist party. At the founding of the KKK the south was nigh universally Democratic (because the Republicans had abolished slavery).

Sure, the Republican party has radically changed in the last seventy years so that it's senseless to say it's the party of Lincoln or the party of Teddy Roosevelt, but that doesn't change the fact that you have no clue what you're talking about.

You're behind the times.

[jeko]

You're thinking of the way things use to be. Arbiters are currently chosen by the corporation. You have no say in who hears your case. The Christian Science Monitor reports that the arbitration firms find in favor of the corporation against the consumer 98.4% of the time and the remaining 1.6% offer consumers laughably small compensation that does not even come close to making them whole.

Let me put it bluntly to be clear. No consumer has ever won in arbitration. Under the current regime, none of them ever will.