There were two big Amazon Twitter stories this week. The biggest one was about billionaire Jeff Bezos’ tone-deaf quote rubbing salt into the wounds of low wage Amazon workers forced to work in horrible conditions often without health insurance as the company pays no taxes. Bezos thanked these workers for paying him to play astronaut on a phallic rocket ship. (Some people were reminded of Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon,” which you must watch.)
The second story received slightly less buzz so we thought we’d talk about that one today. This week, Amazon customers began receiving an email about their right to go to court against Amazon. I’m sure most people were scratching their heads about this, wondering, “Isn’t that already our right?” Of course it should be, but companies like Amazon have taken away that right in fine print found in online contracts that everyone “agrees to.” As if.
Replacing that right is what’s known as “forced arbitration,” which many companies use and requires that all disputes be resolved in individual, private, secret, company-controlled, rigged systems. By also preventing people from joining with others in class actions, the real goal and impact of these clauses is to make claims disappear, allowing companies to escape legal accountability for what they did wrong.
Woops, can you say “backfire?” Amazon decided to give up its “forced arbitration” requirement and allow itself to be sued in court. Why? Because they were outsmarted. Specifically, rather than dropping claims, more than 75,000 Echo users, who were very angry that these Alexa devices were recording them without permission, filed for arbitration, hitting Amazon with a bill for “tens of millions of dollars in filing fees.”
But what Amazon giveth, it immediately taketh away. While Amazon has now agreed to allow itself to be sued in open court - as the Framers of our Constitution would have expected - it will not allow itself to be judged by juries - as the Framers would also have expected. We know they would have expected this because they enshrined the right to civil jury trial in the Bill of Rights (i.e., the Seventh Amendment). “We each waive any right to a jury trial,” Amazon customers supposedly now “agree to.” In other words, “eat dirt, James Madison.”
Amazon remains terrified of being judged by juries, i.e. the American public, but they are hardly alone. Take Airbnb, for example, which hasn’t even taken the steps that Amazon has and continues forcing people into arbitration. Read about the tragic story of a father whose daughter was sexually assaulted and murdered in a Mexican Airbnb rental “with no answers about how she died and no one arrested.”
The company sent them a check, but the family cannot sue to get any answers. As Bloomberg reported, “There’s no legal precedent for Airbnb’s potential liability for crimes that occur inside its listings, largely because the company’s terms of service pushes disputes with users into confidential arbitration.”
There are two important bills in Congress to stop companies from demanding that harmed customers agree to rigged arbitration before they are even allowed to use their service. The first one, the broad Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act or the FAIR Act, has nearly 200 sponsors in the U.S. House of Representatives and 39 Senators. And there’s another bill, just introduced, that would deal with sexual assaults. It is bi-partisan, and it’s called the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault & Sexual Harassment Act. Let’s get behind both of these important bills (and also, stop attacking juries please).
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