Over the last 10 years, thousands of businesses across the United States – from big corporations to storefront shops – have used arbitration to create an alternative system of justice . There, rules tend to favor businesses, and judges and juries have been replaced by arbitrators who commonly consider the companies as their clients. The change has been swift and virtually unnoticed, even though it has meant that tens of millions of Americans have lost a fundamental right: their day in Court. “This amounts to the wholesale privatization of the justice system,” says Myriam Gilles, a law professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. “Americans are being actively deprived of their rights”.
A 2011 Supreme Court ruling cleared the way for them to use the clauses to quash class-action lawsuits. Prevented from joining together as a group in arbitration, most plaintiffs gave up entirely, records show. Still, there are thousands of Americans who — either out of necessity or on principle — want their grievances heard and have taken their chances in arbitration. Little is known about arbitration because the proceedings are confidential and the federal government does not require cases to be reported. The secretive nature of the process makes it difficult to ascertain how fairly the proceedings are conducted. This, of course, suits the companies involved. Some state judges have called the class-action bans a “get out of jail free” card, because it is nearly impossible for one individual to take on a corporation with vast resources.
All it took was adding simple arbitration clauses to contracts that most employees and consumers do not even read. Yet at stake are claims of medical malpractice, sexual harassment, hate crimes, discrimination, theft, fraud, elder abuse and wrongful death, records and interviews show. (Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Michael Corkery of The New York Times).
This is the outward and visible sign of the power of the corporatocracy. Apparently, no outrage has been heard in Congress and no peep out of the White House or anywhere else. Only the New York Times has protested. Thus do our rights disappear out of the windown without a whimper. And it will be copied throughout Europe , you can be sure. It is un-Epicurean and un- democratic and unwinds a system that reaches back to Anglo- Saxon days.
The rules are there to confuse rather than to inform. According to the Wall Street Journal, in the early 1980s, the typical credit card contract was a page long; by the early 2000s, that contract had grown to more than 30 pages of incomprehensible text, designed in large part to add unexpected–and unreadable–terms that favor the card companies. Mortgage-loan documents, payday-loan papers, car-loan terms, and other lending products are often equally incomprehensible.