Wal-Mart Stores has made significant advances in becoming greener and more energy efficient, but the company has not managed to shed its long image of low-pay and benefits, and alleged discrimination toward women employees with regard to pay and promotion. Regardless, its management had apparently rather fight with women in the latter category than settle a huge class-action lawsuit and move sharply to improve their pay and opportunities.
The world’s largest retailer made that clear Wednesday when it asked the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out what has become the nation’s largest class-action lawsuit in history. The lawsuit, filed nine years ago, seeks around $1 billion in compensation for more than 1 million women employees of Wal-Mart who, it claims, have been systematically denied equitable pay and fair opportunities for promotions and advancement relative to what male employees have received.
Though the lawsuit has survived four judicial decisions allowing the lawsuit to be heard as a class-action suit – the latest a decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit to let the case proceed to trial – Wal-Mart remains determined to push its case against such a trial to the Supreme Court.
It claims that class-action status for such a vast group of plaintiffs would be inherently unfair given the wide range of circumstances in each plaintiff’s job situation. It claims, moreover, that its store districts are all too varied to fit in a one-size-fits-all class-action lawsuit.
Plaintiffs’ lawyers make the reasonable argument, as one told The New York Times, that “there is no ‘too-big to be liable’ exception” in the law. The “breadth of the discrimination we documented,” one said, is broad enough to justify a the scope of the class-action lawsuit.
In theory, that sounds plausible. The plaintiffs’ attorneys cite similar circumstances for Wal-Mart’s women employees across the nation. Plaintiffs from various stores interviewed by The Times gave similar stories: They had learned they were being paid substantially less than men in comparable positions at all levels, and they were routinely passed over for promotions that went to men they had trained.
Their attorneys, moreover, pointed out that all of Wal-Mart’s stores have operated under a common set of personnel policies, guidelines and oversight as “cookie-cutter operations.”
Whether the current arch-conservative Supreme Court will rule in favor of allowing this huge class-action suit to go to trial remains to be seen. The court’s infamous ruling in the Ledbetter case, which went against a woman who claimed discrimination when she learned she had been paid less then male peers without her knowledge for decades, gives cause for skepticism. This court has proved to be both activist and retrograde in trampling settled law and legal logic to reach unfair outcomes.
Hopefully, the court will let the facts speak in the Wal-Mart case. If the record shows a broad, consistent pattern of discrimination against women, the case deserves a fair trial. The size, power and clout of any business should not stand in the way of fairness.