User-Friendly Arbitration: Making the Process Serve the Parties

Abstract

The American Arbitration Association, the venerable neutral agency, condenses its founding principles into a simple motto: speed, justice, and economy. Those attributes first commended arbitration to unions and managers, who prized the combination of accessibility and finality. In recent years, however, arbitration has succumbed to institutional bloat: hearings tend to bog down in procedural complexity, undue formality, and delay. It is not uncommon for an ordinary grievance to be heard years after it was filed, as though a constitutional issue were being litigated.