Slashdot Mirror
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."
Yeah, just pick one of the zero phone companies that have no arbitration clause. What the heck do you need phone service for? Or natural gas, or electricity!
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)
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.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Don't Supreme Court justices know the law anymore? This decision is so out in right field that it doesn't even pretend to be supported by law passed by Congress. Contracts used to be invalid if:
1) They are so one-side as to be entirely unfair.
2) They force one party into a position because there is no alternative (the offer you can't refuse).
Carrier-forced arbitration meets both these points. Carriers, by the nature of their enormous power relative to consumers, will always win arbitration because the arbitrators are, for all practical purposes, on the carriers' payrolls. This is because carriers are repeat customers, whereas carrier customers are not. This severely biases the arbitrator in favor of the carriers. There is no easy way to make this even remotely fair to carrier customers. This, by itself, would be enough to nullify arbitration clauses in any sane country.
Carrier customers have no choice but to have a phone of some sort. You just can't exist in most modern markets without the ability to communicate with other people. And all carriers have the same arbitration clause in their contract, so customers have no alternative. This should also, all by itself, be enough to nullify arbitration clauses in contracts in any sane country.
Put these two things together, and it's clear that the Surpeme Court has no intention of applying the law. It seems that they don't even bother reading it anymore. They just want to apply their own sense of right and wrong as it aligns with their political philosophies. If we had a Constitutional Supreme Court, meaning a Supreme Court defined and authorized by our Constitution, prior to this ruling, it just evaporated.
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.
Absolutely nothing, pretty much guaranteed.
...If you're a corporation.
I think that was the whole point over fighting such a silly case all the way up to the Supreme Court--to virtually guarantee that you can never be subject to a class action case again. Let's not kid ourselves, who here thinks that any company will ever again sell any service again without a clause in it forcing arbitration and disallowing class action lawsuits?
Note that arbitrators are notorious for overwhelmingly favoring the party which hires them. In this case, that'd be the company. This is part of a much larger and utterly foolish trend: the systematic dismantling of each available "working through the system" method of either getting justice or effecting change.
Social unrest is like any other kind of energy. It can be neither created nor destroyed; it only changes form. It does not go away merely because you start removing the legitimate means of acting on it. Quite predictably, this is only going to lead to the exact kind of vendettas and feuds that the justice system was specifically put in place to avoid. We're already beginning to see this with groups like Anonymous.
In fact I can sum up Anonymous quite easily. Right or wrong, I believe the reasoning goes like this: "I don't have the millions of dollars and years of my life that it takes to bring a lawsuit against a multinational corporation and actually prevail, but what I do have is some skill with computers and a lot of outrage with no approved outlet." Anonymous should be completely redundant. Instead, they are a blatantly obvious sign that the justice system is failing.
When the authoritarian types witness this, do they feel an immediate need to reform the system? No, they don't. They haven't the wisdom. Instead, they feel a need to "crack down" on computer crimes, as though they were random events happening in a vacuum, as if that does anything to address why they are happening. Where are the leaders who actually understand how to deal with human beings? Are they extinct? Are they the ones who never desired power in the first place?
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
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.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."