The Arbitration of Discrimination Complaints: A New Look at the Issues

This paper reviews the arbitration literature on arbitrator decision making in the context of discrimination cases and finds that most studies in this arena tend to primarily be descriptive. The literature provides some evidence that arbitrators sustain sex discrimination grievances more often than they do race discrimination grievances. The literature, however, does not explain why such a bias may exist. The literature also suggests that many arbitrators may not be competent to handle discrimination cases and may ignore the pertinent state or federal laws in making their decisions. The paper further points out that the gender of the grievant has been a major focus of research in arbitration. However, this stream of research is rather limited and ignores the fact that gender and race may interact in a variety of meaningful contexts in the workplace including grievance arbitration. It is possible that arbitrators would not react in the same way to black and white female grievants as the difference in race may evoke different stereotypes leading to differential perceptions and judgments. Ignoring the race variable and limiting the focus exclusively to gender may have resulted in misleading and simplistic findings in the arbitration literature. Suggestions are given for future research.