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Is Arbitration Really Neutral?
From the SF Examiner, July 21, 1996
According to legal columnist Reynolds Holding, a University of Indiana
study that will be published in January shows that employers who go to
arbitration at least twice a year beat their complaining employees more than
eight percent of the time, while those who use arbitration less often usually
loseÑtheir success rate is around thirty percent.
These results confirm what women whose cases have been settled
through Judicial Arbitration and Mediation Services hearings have suggested
(see WAGE Newsletter, April 1995). Employers, who use arbitration far more
often than any individual employee is likely to, can reuse arbitrators who
have decided in their favor and even the most honest arbitrators will develop
a relationship with repeat employers. Holding likens it to the "...chumminess
between lobbyists and regulators that helps regulated industries."
Justice J. Anthony Kline of the state appellate court recently wrote of
arbitrators, "Because their income depends upon the number of cases they
hear [they] have an economic incentive to rule in favor of the employers who
provide them remunerative work." Unfortunately he was dissenting from the
majority opinion, but the American Arbitration Association does require its
arbitrators to disclose past work for any party in a current case. Also
hopeful: the California Supreme Court will soon decide two cases challenging
the fairness of the current system of arbitration.
-wage@wage.org-