1.5 Million Women Take On Wal-Mart

The largest sex discrimination case in US legal history may end up with 1.5 million women taking on Wal-Mart.

The case started with only six women claiming that female workers were “paid less and promoted less often than men”, but once word got around a huge portion of Wal-Mart staff wanted to join up and get their compensation.

Wal-Mart is fighting back saying that all of these women cannot put their claims into one case, what’s called a Class Action Suit, because they are a franchise. If successful, this would mean that the women would need to file separate lawsuits against the individual stores they work for.

This, of course, would mean that likely a lot of women wouldn’t bother, and that if they did their case would be much weaker. One woman or 1.5 million women — which is more likely to get what they want?

“Wal-Mart said that allowing the large number of claims to go forward would set off an avalanche of similar class-action lawsuits in California and the other Western states.” But so what? Isn’t that the point?

If these “large number of claims” exist, and a “large number” of women have been discriminated against then these other claims should go ahead and it would be wrong to think otherwise. If people have been badly treated then they deserve compensation.

Currently the Supreme Court is looking at whether or not these cases can all be filed together in a Class Action, not whether or not the discrimination happened. That part of it will take place in Spring 2011.

Whether or not these women are able to file together or separately, it looks like they have already had a great impact on Wal-Mart since the claims started in 2001. Since then Wal-Mart has “created a women’s leadership council made up of senior executives from the more than dozen countries it operates in.” Looks like the women have changed the way Wal-Mart does business, whether or not they win this case.

Contact the author here: mack@morningquickie.com