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Comment by p49k | Hacker News Reader

"It is unfortunate that Waymo will be permitted to avoid abiding by the arbitration promise it requires its employees to make."

The idea of forcing people into arbitration has crept into every agreement and contract that Americans enter, and it's out of control. Congress needs to pass a law forbidding contracts from forcing individuals into arbitration.

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> Congress needs to pass a law forbidding contracts from forcing individuals into arbitration.

Congress, unfortunately, passed almost exactly the opposite law. The American courts traditionally disfavored binding arbitration, viewing it as a kind of illegitimate private court usurping the power of the proper courts. The Federal Arbitration Act (1925) overturned that norm with regard to federal-court cases, and the Supreme Court controversially ruled in 1984 [1] that the FAA preempted state anti-arbitration laws as well, which is when binding arbitration really began to take off.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southland_Corp._v._Keating

>Congress needs to pass a law forbidding contracts from forcing individuals into arbitration.

Hold on there. Let's not dismiss it out of hand - bypassing the court system and getting things resolved quickly has benefits. And I suspect the arbitration system is itself a response to some judicial excesses and the insane American lawsuit-happy culture.

I'm not saying there aren't problems, and the judicial system should be there, but it's not bad if people solve their own problems without government involvement.

A faster alternative to courts is a good idea. However, the existing arbitration system is biased exceptionally heavy towards repeat customers (and that comes in addition to inherent bias of reality towards deeper pockets).

Unlike a judge, an arbiter who finds against a company will not get their repeat business; that's an inherent conflict of interest.

When both parties agree to take a specific dispute to arbitration, great. Writing it into lopsided contracts is abusive bullshit though.

Arbitration must remain voluntary, as your right to a proper court must not be violated.

Again, I'm not sure about that. Speaking in generalities, why can't two parties enter into binding arbitration? For example, divorce arbitration can be significantly cheaper than going through the court system but it only works if it's binding otherwise one unsatisfied party can simply ignore the ruling.

they first need to forbid people to sue for whatever they feel like, especially when its intentionally bullshit, just to drive the other party into bankruptcy.

I believe it's already illegal to knowingly file a spurious lawsuit.

Sure. But proving it to the point that you can make the other party pay for it, without going bankrupt yourself, is not easy.

No one claimed it was. It's not easy to prove you were raped either and the majority of people don't seem to have any problem with that. We have work to do, but the problem doesn't seem to be the law itself.

its not your job to prove you were raped. its the prosecutions job to do that.

the majority of people has a problem with rape going unpunished. but criminal justice is a bit fickle, because you cant just make it easier to convict people without having the false conviction rate shoot through the roof. and in a free society, youd rather err a bit on the side of letting some people who did commit crimes go.

Binding arbitration has its place. Look at the binding arbitration decision between Qualcomm and Blackberry, which is resulting in Blackberry receiving an $815,000,000 refund from Qualcomm after a royalty dispute involving licensed standard essential patents.

Because it was binding arbitration and not traditional court proceedings, this judgment is not appealable. This compressed what would have been a 10-year drawn out and extremely costly process into five days. That's it!

There are more arguments against binding arbitration when it's an individual against a conglomerate - you get a biased arbitrator and you're sunk with no means of redress.

0) You can appeal arbitration awards within the arbitration company[0].

1) You can appeal arbitration rulings to the court system for a subset of situations (like misconduct or fraud by the arbiters)[1].

[0] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:VjU7-9v...

[1] https://apps.americanbar.org/litigation/committees/adr/artic...

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