Cowpuncher said:
Sandhusker,
I am not positive about how all arbitration panels work, but they are used by stock brokers, automobile makers, etc. Most of them provide for each party to pick one representative and that the third representative must be independent - maybe chosen by the two selected by the parties.
If you don't have confidence in the organization you are working with, don't get involved with them.
Arbitration can be a good system. In these contracts that Scott Hamilton talked about they are not. Often times it takes 20 K to even get a hearing and then there are no rules for discovery. If a company wants to continue to hide the evidence, they can. There is no discovery process that can find the truth so those with less information are at huge risk.
The other thing is that arbitration agreements do not make case law. If, for instance, the company is found to be doing wrong, they can hide this fact and make everyone take an individual arbitration case which is expensive. Companies can cheat each person the cost of arbitration and not make it worth getting justice. For instance, if it costs 20 K to do arbitration, it is uneconomical for individuals to bring an arbitration case if the damage us under the 20 K. If you make justice uneconomical, guess what---you won't get it. Since each individual is arbitrated separately, they can cheat each individual under that amount. A case where one wins can not be expounded to other cases.
Arbitration can also be a problem if one side always goes there. In the case of a large company and many small farmers, the repeater is the company. Since they are the repeater, they know the arbiters and can "pick" the ones that are favorable.
There have been cases where arbitration has sided with producers and then the agri-companies just ignored the results. Then a lawsuit had to be filed anyway.
Do a little research on arbitration and you will see that there are major problems. The big one, in my opinion, is narrowing the decision to an elite few judges and not a jury.
Radar, I don't believe McDonalds should be held responsible for 40 lbs overweight necessarily. If they are not posting their nutritional information required by law or spiking their food, that is another case. Arbitration should not decrease their responsibility, which is what most arbitration agreements do (some labor arbitration systems are run more fairly partly because the labor union is also a repeater).
The spilled coffee was another big Mc D story. We don't know if the McD person was so busy that she/he didn't put the lid on and actually spilled it on the consumer because they were rushed by management in their job. The details and facts are for juries to determine.
