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Comment by WillPostForFood | Hacker News Reader

What part do you think should be illegal?

I don't think it should be legal to be able to surrender the ability to pursue legal action outside of very specific waivers. I'm fine with companies incentivizing arbitration but if a company is able to fully block regular legal actions (especially class action lawsuits) then that smells bad.

But the wavers are rather specific, and in all cases I encountered, there are some exceptions for serious cases which the law does not allow to relegate to arbitration.

I suppose that arbitration lowers the cost of a dispute very seriously. It makes sorting out small issues affordable and much faster. I see it as a good tradeoff as long as I don't depend on it in potentially serious cases, where hiring a lawyer would be the least of my troubles.

Uber's[1] is usually held up as a prime example of these agreements - and reading through it the only carve out they allow seems to be for sexual assault[2]. IANAL but to my reading the only other carve out is when binding arbitration would be illegal. It also seems to preempt any ability to bring pretty much any kind of class action lawsuit.

1. https://www.uber.com/legal/en/document/?name=uber-connect-te...

2. "Notwithstanding the foregoing, where you allege claims of sexual assault or sexual harassment[...]"

Yes, we often look at it from a personal choice point of view: I can evaluate the contract and decide that I’d like to waive this right. But the law exists to protect everyone, and part of that is it imposes a little bit on everyone.

If a basically every company insists that you waive your employee rights to work for them, then the only people with those rights are the unemployed, rendering those laws a bit moot.

You gain a competitive advantage over your peers by being willing to waive your rights, in the sense that a company of course would like to not have to respect your rights. The point of employee protection laws is to take that off the table.

My preference here, if I had a magical "change the world wand", would be to allow arbitration to be binding only B2B and not between a business and a consumer. A consumer should always be able to resort to the courts proper.

Surrendering rights in any contract of adhesion. I'd consider it to be reasonable for a negotiated contract between two companies to include a binding arbitration clause; however, any "take-it-or-leave-it" consumer nonnegotiated contracts should be (and in some jurisdictions are) heavily restricted with respect to potentially unfair clauses, one of them being binding arbitration.

Most likely they're referring to the ability for a contract to include terms that remove your right to legal recourse.

> What part do you think should be illegal?

The part about cutting off your counterparty's access to the justice system

The part where you're bound to waiving your legal rights in order to engage in commerce with companies that you can't really avoid engaging in commerce with, unless you want to be an off-grid homesteader.

There's nothing wrong with arbitration as a first choice to avoid court, to the benefit of both parties. There's something very wrong with binding arbitration.

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