Arbitration Rules Are More Than Page Filler
We all know rules exist for a reason. In sports, they minimize cheating and injuries. In school, they maximize learning opportunities. In the health industry, they save lives. In business, they establish behavior that maintains professional protocol. Why anyone would voluntarily breach arbitration rules — the very thing that protects outsourcers from abuse — is beyond reason.
In this simple, clear-case, we look at an individual who admittedly broke RentACoder’s arbitration rules, yet felt compelled to complain about the repercussions in public. The case is not only an avoidable outsourcing mistake, it’s a senseless one. Check it out.
The Public Complaint
RentACoder’s Arbitration Rules
In every arbitration email, you’ll find a link that points to RentACoder’s Mediation / Arbitration page for the project in question. What you won’t find is a worker’s email address. That’s because you’re not allowed to communicate outside of the form that loads on this page. If you do, you place the project’s case in jeopardy and risk losing the case. You might even risk losing your account altogether, as the person above rightfully discovered.
After crafting a response, parties must check all of the CC: boxes to email that response to everyone involved, including the assigned arbitrator. Trying to respond to the arbitrator only will initiate a warning that you’re not communicating with both parties.
Nine times out of ten, you won’t have a good reason not to communicate with both parties. An acceptable reason would be if you need to excuse yourself from arbitration for personal reasons, and you simply don’t want your worker to know what those personal reasons are. Believing that arbitration is unwarranted is not a good reason – nor is having “other important things to do.”
Should you insist on submitting a private message to the arbitrator, and should the arbitrator determine your message should have been sent to the worker as well, the arbitrator will make your post available to the worker and chastise you for not following the rules. Keep it up and you’ll lose the case and/or your account.
It’s In Writing. Everywhere.
Those are the rules. The relevant thing here is that this part of RentACoder’s arbitration rules are found (1) on the RentACoder website, (2) in arbitration email messages, and (3) on the Mediation / Arbitration page itself. Instructions not to communicate privately are repeated several times, and the act of communicating privately anyway could be seen as an act of defiance.
But there’s no room for defiance in outsourcing. Outsourcing is a contract-dependent business, and when you have individuals who aren’t even willing to follow the most simple rules, you have a situation in which contract agreements aren’t taken seriously, respected, or honored.
Fortunately, RentACoder takes its service and its contracts seriously even when some of its participants aren’t willing to. It may upset a few amateurs, but it keeps the service safe for the rest of its professionals!
