Colvin on Arbitration Clauses and D.R. Horton

Consistent with Imre's post below, Alex Colvin (Cornell ILR) provides this news of his own study:

In a nice conjunction with the D.R. Horton cases arguments coming up, I also have a report out today on the use of mandatory employment arbitration clauses, as well as the incidence of class action waivers. The study was sponsored by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).

This is a nationally representative, establishment-level survey of 628 employers. It allows me to get a measure of the percentage of employees covered by mandatory arbitration. The key take-away is that I find that 56.2 percent of private sector nonunion employees are covered by mandatory arbitration. Of the employees covered by mandatory arbitration, 41.1 percent have class action waivers in the procedures.

Although the methodology is different, there is some nice consistency between the results of Imre’s study and mine. His focus is on the Fortune 100 companies, where my reading is that he finds 80 use mandatory arbitration for some workers using a broad measure or 66 using a narrower measure. In some additional analysis of my survey results, I found that larger employers were more likely to use mandatory arbitration, with 65.1 percent of employers with 1000 or more employees having mandatory arbitration procedures. Our numbers are also generally consistent with regard to the proportion of mandatory arbitration procedures that include class action waivers. So my take-away is that the two studies' results reinforce the validity of each other’s findings.

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