Author(s): Pierre Mallet, Najlaa Flayyih, Zeana Ghanim Abdijabar
Arbitration has been recently dominating the financial transactions, because of its effectiveness in settling disputes as well as achieving interests of conflicting parties. Accordingly and as a result of the domination of arbitration processes, other dispute resolution methods, such as reconciliation or resorting to the judiciary have been negatively affected. However, referring to arbitration in resolving disputes that result from individual labor often raises controversial issues and intellectually different attitudes. According to such conflicting points of view, some experts assume that arbitration could be considered as an ideal means for solving this type of dispute. Others, however, might raise doubts about its fair judgments, especially if such disputes occur between employers and their employees. It should be taken into consideration that the legislator in general has attempted to protect the weak party in this relation, and that is the laborer, through the enactment of rules, which govern the contract,. Any violation to these rules shall nullify any condition used against them. In order to achieve some kind of equity and consistency between two conflicting philosophies, we may claim that resorting to arbitration is somehow unavoidable as a means for resolving individual labor disputes. Nevertheless, arbitration in this case shall be used within the limits that could protect the laborer’s rights in face of his opponent within the framework of the rules stated above. These rules shall provide opportunities to benefit from the features of arbitration with the possibility of including them as an article or articles when constructing a labor contract. Nonetheless, such procedure shall be taken within a legal framework according to the Law of Labor so as to prevent employers from exploiting them on their behalf against employees. One of these regulations is to stipulate in the contract that in case of resorting to arbitration to settle any dispute that may arise between the two parties, then the employer shall be the one who bears its costs. It is also assumed that such type of dispute could be solved through arbitration by adopting a value criterion of the wages that an employee receives from work. It is also posited that specialized arbitration centers could be established for settling disputes with workers in an attempt to protect employees’ interests and meanwhile restrict the arbitrators’ wages.