Haruna,
In a new ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court has
allowed Big Business to deprive you of your best weapon to fight back if
you are cheated or harmed by corporate wrongdoing.
The court’s 5-4 decision Wednesday in
AT&T v. Concepcion
— in which Public Citizen represented the plaintiffs — permits
corporations to use consumer and employment contracts to take away your
right to join class-action lawsuits.
If this sounds like something that matters only to lawyers, read on to learn just how much it matters to all of us.
You’ve likely entered into “agreements” with
many corporations — maybe without even realizing it. When you bought a
cell phone or rented a car. When you opened a bank account, got a credit
card or refinanced your mortgage. When you saw a doctor or arranged
medical care for a loved one. When you got hired at your job.
You didn’t get to negotiate the terms of these
contracts. If you needed that phone or that job, you signed on the
dotted line. And unless you’re a contracts attorney, you probably
couldn’t make sense of all the legalese.
More and more, these contracts include what are
known as binding mandatory arbitration clauses. The word “arbitration”
may sound like a good thing: “Hey, let’s sit down and talk this out —
nobody wants to go through a lawsuit.”
But in actuality, forced arbitration does not
provide the protections of traditional trials, including the ability to
gather information from corporate defendants. And the largest
arbitration firms are heavily biased in favor of Big Business and
against consumers.
The Supreme Court has ruled not only that
corporations can force people into arbitration, but also that they can
use arbitration clauses to deny those they harm the right join together
to seek justice in a court of law.
Countless victims of corporate greed will be denied any redress whatsoever.
Help
Public Citizen defend the rights of people against corporate abuse by
contributing $20, $40, $100 or whatever you can today.
Big corporations, with their myopic focus on
profits, too often cross the line into fraud, discrimination or other
illegal practices — often against large groups of consumers or
employees.
But an individual person who has suffered from
corporate misconduct may not stand to gain enough to make it worth the
time, effort and expense of suing a giant corporation.
Imagine your phone company illegally charges you
and a million other customers $10 each. The company “earns” $10 million
by repeating the same misdeed against many customers. Under the Supreme
Court’s new ruling, the company can use an arbitration “agreement” to
prohibit you from joining with any of those other customers to hold the
company accountable.
Who has the time, money or expertise to challenge a huge corporation over $10, $100 or even $1,000?
This is why class actions are so important.
They give ordinary people with legitimate — if
not necessarily highly lucrative — consumer, employment, civil rights
and other claims that stem from corporate wrongdoing a way to work
together so that they have a fighting chance to obtain justice against
perpetrators with more money, more lawyers and more friends in high
places.
But not anymore.
With this ruling, how can we prevent corporations from hiding behind legalese while they rip us off?
The most critical response is to pass
legislation that would ban forced arbitration clauses — and therefore
anything in those clauses that limits your rights.
In response to the Supreme Court’s ruling,
Senator Al Franken, Senator Richard Blumenthal and Representative Hank
Johnson announced their plan to reintroduce the Arbitration Fairness Act
in Congress.
As Senator Franken noted, the Supreme Court
decision “essentially insulates companies from liability when they
defraud a large number of customers of a relatively small amount of
money,” whereas his bill would allow consumers to continue to “play an
important role in holding corporations accountable.”
Public Citizen has been working with Congress
and the White House, mobilizing our grassroots activists, and leading
coalition efforts to advance legislation to end forced arbitration.
Public Citizen has been fighting for and
winning consumer protections for 40 years and counting. We are committed
to ending forced arbitration and defending people’s right to have their
day in court.
Please contribute today so that Public Citizen has the resources to keep standing up to corporate power.
Together, we will make progress.
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Sincerely,
Robert Weissman
President, Public Citizen |
P.S. To learn more about the Supreme Court ruling, visit our
Consumer Law & Policy Blog.