Private justice, public accountability: Institutional failure and the politics of scandal at work.

• In Event: Democratic Institutions and the Law (Co-sponsored by Sociology of Law Section)

Abstract

Introduced quietly in the 1990s, mandatory arbitration today covers over half of U.S. private sector workers, barring them from public courts, class actions, and full due process in legal disputes with employers. In doing so, it shifts conflict away from public, democratically accountable institutions into private, confidential proceedings run by third-party companies with no oversight or public record. This article asks: What happens to claims of workplace injustice when formal institutions of public accountability are closed? The dominant view holds that such claims recede from public life. Drawing on new evidence, this study suggests that institutional closure does not eliminate workers' demands for accountability, but reorganizes the institutional pathways through which they enter the public sphere. When litigation-based channels of democratic oversight contract, grievances migrate into alternative arenas, notably the press and social media, where accountability operates through dynamics of scandal rather than formal adjudication. The result is not suppression, but displacement: a shift in how, where, and for whom workplace harms become publicly consequential. Findings suggest this dynamic was at play in the rise of the #MeToo movement. Drawing on a novel panel dataset of large U.S. firms from 2000–2022, analysis combines fixed effects regression models with content analysis of more than 1,200 news articles to examine how employer arbitration adoption reshapes public scrutiny of workplace rights violations. These findings challenge the dominant, but untested, assumption that mandatory arbitration shields employers from scandal. More broadly, they show that when core institutions of democratic accountability constrict or fail, demands for public accountability do not disappear—they changes venue and form, at times generating more social conflict, not less.

Author

• Zoe Virginia Chanin, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor