Arbitration - Part 1
Helen L. Walters says her boss called her a ‘hooker,’ a ‘bitch’ and a ‘streetwalker.’ Sometimes he brandished a riding crop in front of her and once he left condoms on her desk.
Ms. Walters, then a trading-room secretary at a California brokerage firm, filed a complaint against him alleging sexual harassment. In a formal hearing, he readily admitted to the whip and the condoms, and to using all of those epithets. Her case, legal scholars agree, seems a textbook example of illegal harassment as defined by the Supreme Court: a situation in which a ‘reasonable person’ would find the work environment ‘hostile or abusive.’
So why did Ms. Walters lose?
Ms. Walters slammed into a little-known, but extraordinarily daunting, roadblock facing many women in the securities industry: Bias complaints, like any other employee dispute, must go through the industry’s mandatory-arbitration system. That means victims’ complaints can’t be heard in court by judge or jury, no matter how strong their merit.
Men’s Club: Riding Crop and Slurs: How Wall Street Dealt with a Sex-Bias Case, Wall Street Journal, June 9, 1994, by Margaret Jacobs, as quoted in Judicial Apartheid, by Pam Martens.
[W]omen felt they might be taken seriously. But instead of the claims being ushered into the vaunted U.S. court system, where sunshine and continued public debate might have led to real change… claims were heard in secret in hotel rooms, the typical venue for the mushrooming use of private arbitration in the U.S. today.
Will France Tidy Up After Housekeeper Charges? Counterpunch, June 7, 2011, by Pam Martens.
