Seems like this is pervasive enough to affect pretty much everyone. Or am I misunderstanding something here ?
I'm not saying these aren't valid and serious issues. Just that they're not day-to-day matters in the same way that healthcare, taxes, gas prices, or housing costs are. They're the type of issues that nobody thinks about until it bites them one day.
Like you said, it's probably not what the majority of people are experiencing.
[1] https://berniesanders.com/issues/corporate-accountability-an...
> Seems like this is pervasive enough to affect pretty much everyone.
Sadly, it's one of those things that effects everyone but that they don't know about until it's too late.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/15/us/politics/pete-buttigie...
E.g. if you have a task to do for which you have to reveal secrets, how do you protect your moat without non-compete clauses if you hire employees or contractors? In other words, you need people who are allowed to sign away their rights. If you don't allow this as a default state, you have to hand out licenses to those who understand the issue.
Right now, you have the concept of Age of Majority [1]. We simply assume that everybody who is old enough is capable of understanding his rights. If you question this, you will have a funny presidential campaign where you ask people to vote for you because they are not competent enough. That said, how is the president the right person to change that law?
2. For the most part, the direct gains to consumers are small. Even if you get Door Dash to pay out two-thirds of its $9 mil., it's less than a thousand bucks per person. Pay a $250 filing fee, figure 1/3 fee for the lawyers, and you get $500 in an ideal case. That's nice for clients, but not life-changing. Indirectly, of course, there are large benefits.
3. Compared to one client's recovery, it looks like a windfall to lawyers. And most Americans would rather shoot themselves in the foot (metaphorically, at least) than help lawyers get rich.
(In fact, it's probably not all that profitable for the lawyers. It looks like low-margin work that only pays off for the firm if each lawyer tries to manage an ungodly number of cases.)
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/09/trump-and-cl...
[2] https://www.thedailybeast.com/wheres-mike-bloomberg-billiona...
[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michelatindera/2020/02/01/billi...
A union is designed to protect your rights, forced arbitration is designed to limit your rights.
Arbitration clauses are so ubiquitous that it would be almost impossible to operate in modern society while refusing to sign them.
Arbitration is ubiquitous because even at the cost of hundreds of dollars per hour arbitration is a lot cheaper and faster than going to court. And if people don't like the results of arbitration, there's still the option of claiming impartial arbitration and filing a lawsuit anyway. Companies that have arbitration agreements still get sued.
Response to techsupporter, HN isn't letting me make a new comment:
> This is not accurate. Almost every mandatory binding arbitration clause of substance includes wording that the arbitrator's decision is final and cannot be appealed.
There is nothing to stop you from appealing anyway. The fact that you're trying to seek an outcome different from the result of private arbitration does increase the chances that the courts will decide to reject your case. It onus on the plaintiff to prove that arbitration was not done correctly.
There are good observations to be made about the impartiality of arbiters - it's companies that are usually the ones paying for their services, and so it's not hard to image that this creates a conflict of interest. But a company that can force arbitration, and then use an arbiter that had agreed to dismiss all complaints is not correct - the kind of scenario you lay out is exactly the reason why you can sue even after agreeing to arbitration.
Talent guilds are generally the only unions that restrict their members from doing non-union work, and even the talent guilds have exceptions for lower-earning members.
This is not accurate. Almost every mandatory binding arbitration clause of substance includes wording that the arbitrator's decision is final and cannot be appealed. Also, the question of whether the arbitrator's ruling was fair and impartial--did you mean claiming "partial," or biased, arbitration?--is, much like the question of jurisdiction or ability to arbitrate, left to the arbitrator to decide under those same terms.
The law does not work like that because judges don’t work like that. There are rights you can’t sign away. No matter what the contract says non competes are not valid in California. You can’t agree to be someone’s slave if you can’t pay your debts and have the court enforce that.
Obviously there are limits, but if the arbitrators aren't open and blatant about their bias, I think you'd be hard pressed to find any remedy if you were wronged by a biased arbitrator.
The point of arbitration isn't to allow companies to engage illegal criminal conduct like slavery, it's to make them practically immune from civil court proceedings.
You’re right but that’s not a great example of the rights you give up on joining a union. The right to work non union jobs isn’t particularly valuable except to non members and non members and people just starting their career are not the union’s concern. They protect the interests of the average member, so people for whom it’s a career, who have some years of experience. Those don’t generally work crappy jobs unless there’s discrimination against them.
Giving up the right to negotiate your own compensation would be a huge deal for any professions or jobs with obvious large differences in productivity and many employers. So you only see that at the bottom end. No limits on top end compensation. The Screen Actors Guild doesn’t say with this many years experience you must get paid this much, they say no one can get paid less than this.
With a single employer compressing pay differentials is a lot easier so you get what the average member wants, security of tenure, seniority based pay and promotions. If you want to negotiate something different go find another employer.
My understanding is that arbitration is only a thing in the modern world because there is a law allowing it, and the law only allows it because of "activist judges" interpreting it, although of course we don't call them that.
Do you know how that works with the idea that by joining a union you are giving up your right to work non-union jobs?
I'm not trying to say that you are wrong, I just don't know enough to know if that was a special case or if there are certain circumstances where a union worker can or cannot work a non-union job.
In "modern _US_ society".