Mayoral candidate Joe Mallahan has hyped his private-sector executive experience at T-Mobile as a big selling point on his political resume.
However, Nickels supporters, including the Communications Workers of America (CWA), turned Mallahan’s affiliation with T-Mobile against him in July , citing T-Mobile’s "record of union busting."
And last week , when we got our hands on a letter T-Mobile sent to state legislators earlier this year urging them not to expand unemployment insurance, we asked Mallahan what he thought of T-Mobile’s position. Mallahan told us he thought unemployment insurance should have been expanded.
Now, another T-Mobile public policy position—this one focusing on consumer rights—has come to our attention.
T-Mobile argued, all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court (where they lost in 2008 ), that an arbitration clause in the customers contract trumped customers’ rights to pursue a class -action lawsuit against the company. (King County T-Mobile customers helped spark the case when they sued the phone giant over what they believed were unfair and undisclosed fees in King County Superior Court in 2005.)
T-Mobile tried, unsuccessfully, to stall the case by challenging the suit itself in federal court. In January 2008, five months before the US Supreme Court ruling—the U.S. Court of Appeals foreshadowed the high court’s decision with a ruling of its own that took the consumers’ side. The PI reported :
T-Mobile customers Kathleen Lowden and John Mahowald sued T-Mobile in King County Superior Court in 2005, alleging that the wireless carrier wrongly charged them for roaming, long distance, night-time and other fees that should have been free. They said T-Mobile also levied other charges, such as "a universal service fund fee," that weren’t advertised.
T-Mobile removed the case to federal district court and tried to compel mandatory arbitration, noting that the consumers had signed a contract agreeing to resolve their disputes in this manner.
Last summer, the Washington State Supreme court ruled that former Cingular Wireless, now AT&T, cannot enforce a waiver in its contract that prohibits customers from pursuing a class action.
Citing that decision, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals wrote that T-Mobile’s class action waiver couldn’t be enforced.
Asked for Mallahan’s opinion of T-Mobile’s position, Mallahan’s campaign spokesperson Charla Neuman quipped in an email: "Let me know when you have a question about an issue relevant to the City of Seattle and not the State of California."
(One of the plaintiffs lives in California, but the case —a class action in United States District Court, Western District of Washington at Seattle—concerns Washington state’s consumer protection act and again, involves local T-Mobile customers.)
When pressed, Neuman ultimately said the campaign couldn’t comment on ongoing litigation.
While the fight over the billing is indeed ongoing, the larger issue about T-Mobile’s effort to prevent consumers from filing class action suits has been decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.
