Filed under: News, Profiles, Race and Civil Rights
A lawyer for a group of women seeking to sue Wal-Mart for discriminating against them when it came to pay and promotions said the company's attempt to challenge the formation of a class action lawsuit could hurt civil rights cases going forward.
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case, which is the biggest employment discrimination case in the nation's history. Wal-Mart is arguing that there are too many plaintiffs for them to have similar claims. The class consists of anywhere from 500,000 to 1.6 million women.
The New York Times reports:
The question is not whether there was discrimination but rather whether the claims by the individual employees may be combined as a class action. The court's decision on that issue will almost certainly affect all sorts of class-action suits, including ones asserting antitrust, securities and product liability.
Wal-Mart, which says its policies expressly bar discrimination and promote diversity, said the women in the potential class action - who worked in 3,400 stores in 170 job classifications - could not possibly have enough in common to make class-action treatment appropriate.
"We are pleased that the Supreme Court has granted review in this important case," a Wal-Mart statement said. "The current confusion in class-action law is harmful for everyone - employers, employees, businesses of all types and sizes and the civil justice system. These are exceedingly important issues that reach far beyond this particular case."
But the lawyer for the plaintiffs says this decision could prevent other civil rights cases, which often use class action status, from going forward.
"Wal-Mart has thrown up an extraordinarily broad number of issues, many of which, if the court seriously entertained, could very severely undermine many civil rights class actions," attorney Brad Seligman told the Times.
Seligman and his team have argued that the class size is justified:
"The class is large because Wal-Mart is the nation's largest employer," the brief said, "and manages its operations and employment practices in a highly uniform and centralized manner."
The case pits the interests of businesses against the interests of civil rights groups. The Washington Post reports:
Business groups say certification of a class action puts enormous pressure on a company to settle, regardless of whether the charges can be proved, because of the cost of the litigation and the potential award. For Wal-Mart, the nation's largest employer, the sum could be billions of dollars.But civil rights groups say class-action suits are the most effective and cost-efficient way to make sure a business ends discriminatory practices and pays a price for its actions.
Judges who dissented in the original decision that allowed the suit to go forward as a class action said the class was too vast and that Wal-Mart will not be able to present tailored defenses.
"Maybe there'd be no difference between 500 employees and 500,000 employees if they all had similar jobs, worked at the same half-billion-square-foot store and were supervised by the same managers," wrote Chief Judge Alex Kozinski. "But the half-million members of the majority's approved class held a multitude of jobs, at different levels of Wal-Mart's hierarchy, for variable lengths of time, in 3,400 stores, sprinkled across 50 states, with a kaleidoscope of supervisors (male and female)....They have little in common but their sex and this lawsuit."
That's wrong. This is not a case about what happened to each individual but a culture of discrimination that affected many individuals.
A culture of discrimination can exist across a vast body or structure. Take Jim Crow, for example. That discrimination may have looked different in New York City than the Deep South but it was hateful discrimination nonetheless that affected millions of Americans across vast areas.
Given this country's history of discrimination against women and other groups, is it so hard to believe that Wal-Mart or any other large corporate entity has a culture where the ideas of women are not valued and they are not rewarded for their contributions?
Go to any Wal-Mart in America and it appears basically the same. Large corporate entities in America value the idea that you can step into any store and have it be the same as any other. That's a product of a carefully defined corporate culture. Discrimination in a corporation can be cultivated in the same way.
Finally, Wal-Mart will have an opportunity to show in court that they did not have a culture of discrimination as they claim. How many women managers do they have? Are women and men who do the same job paid the same? These are easy things for Wal-Mart to prove.
The civil rights of individuals deserve to be protected.