Hooray -- It's Arbitration Fairness Day!

Yawn.

Rights shmights, I agree with Justice Thomas -- you and your whiny "right" to buy luxury items like a telephone or air conditioning -- what's wrong with you people? That's not what this country is about!

As usual, I think Archie Bunker summed it up best:

Archie Bunker: That ain't the American Way, buddy. No, siree. Listen here, professor. You're the one who need an American History lesson. You don't know nothin' about Lady Liberty standin' there in the harbor, with her torch on high screamin' out to all the nations in the world: "Send me your poor, your deadbeats, your filthy." And all the nations send 'em in here, they come swarming in like ants. Your Spanish P.R.'s from the Caribboin, your Japs, your Chinamen, your Krauts and your Hebes and your English fags. All of 'em come in here and they're all free to live in their own separate sections where they feel safe. And they'll bust your head if you go in there. *That's* what makes America great, buddy.
[exits Stivic house]
Mike Stivic: [to Gloria] I think we just heard Archie Bunker's Bicentennial Minute.

Still, if you are concerned with having no access to court when you buy anything, even something as high-falutin' as a telephone, somebody is trying to do something about that today:

A coalition of 67 consumer groups, including Public Citizen and Consumers Union, will escort dozens of victims of the high costs and low awards rate of arbitrations to visit with their congressmen tomorrow during “Arbitration Fairness Day.” The all-day activities will include the unveiling of a survey of Americans who don’t like the idea of giving up their rights to court.

Arbitration advocates will no doubt come back with their own examples to show the opposite. The Chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform underwrote a 2005 poll of 609 adults who used arbitration and liked it. Two-thirds said they would be likely to use it again. But it tells little about the suckers who have the choice made for them. Only 19 percent of the people in the poll were required by contract to use arbitration, and those are the cases under fire.

Forced Arbitration

That notion seems to be lost even on members of the Supreme Court, which earlier this month ruled that a group of building- services workers who had been demoted couldn’t override mandatory arbitration to take their age-discrimination case to court. Among the arguments by Justice Clarence Thomas was that the streamlined procedures of arbitration are not a basis to consider the forum inadequate, and that arbitration’s informality “is one of the chief reasons that parties select arbitration.”

Wrong, Mr. Justice. “The parties” don’t select arbitration in these disputed cases. Only one party does.

My favorite local arbitrator, by the way, is former Chief Justice Arthur England, who is unfailingly pleasant and highly professional.

Then again, at $650 an hour, he better be.