The thing is, insurance is almost always meant to spread around risk from random events, such as a car accident, unexpected disease, act of nature, or in the most extreme case, an engineering or manufacturing mistake that causes a rocket to blow up. Except in cases of fraud, these situations arise randomly or due to systemic problems that can be quantified within the context of the insured parties. With arbitration, especially when mandated by an employer, the process is easily used to make possible behavior that the legal system would otherwise never allow, by people who fully <i>intend</i> to do so, just like when someone buys insurance with the intent of burning their own house down for the cash payout. Unlike the insurance company, however, the employee has no remaining legal recourse outside of a predetermined (and possibly biased) arbitration process just because it is in the contract.<p>If an employer is explicitly trying to minimize their risk and costs by mandating arbitration how can you ever trust them to pick an unbiased arbiter? If an agent is trying to maximize their outcomes by forcing arbitration, why would they then chose any arbiter that isn&#x27;t more likely to side with them?<p>You can argue that allowing arbitration is a trust signal, but at the same time it can send a signal that the employer is planning on, or at least thinks it a possibility, that they will violate some terms of the contract, whether those terms are explicit or implicit (i.e. due to legislation or court precedent). The problem is that the information assymetry between an employer and employee is so vast such that arbitration is a tool easily used to further exploit workers.