Ernst
Well-Known Member
Walmart could be involved in the largest class action in legal history.
I have been told and I also know that the woman who works at my local walmart who are in management are rather hard core types. The requirement to advance at walmart is to be anti-worker.
These woman may be on to something.
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http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-court-walmart-20110330,0,173597.story
Supreme Court justices, sharply divided along gender lines, appeared poised to reject a nationwide class-action suit that accuses Wal-Mart Stores Inc. of sex discrimination.
Led by Justices Anthony M. Kennedy and Antonin Scalia, the majority of men on the court questioned how Wal-Mart could be held liable for illegal sex bias when its 3,400 store managers across the nation decide who gets promoted and who receives pay raises.
"It's not clear to me: What's the unlawful policy that Wal-Mart has adopted?" Kennedy asked. The company's written policy calls for equal treatment without regard to race or sex.
But Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan who together mark the first time the court has had three women on the bench asserted that a corporate policy of letting store managers decide on promotions could result in discrimination against women.
The statistics generated in the case so far strongly suggested that was what had occurred, they said.
A lawyer representing the female plaintiffs argued that Wal-Mart's corporate culture teaches mostly male supervisors that women are "less aggressive" than men and therefore less suited to being managers.
Unconvinced, Scalia called that "an assessment of why the percentage [of women in management] is different," but it is not evidence of an illegal policy. Wal-Mart does not say, "Don't promote women," he said.
"If you have an aggressive woman, promote her," Scalia added.
Ginsburg, who made her legal reputation in sex-discrimination law, said Wal-Mart's experience showed how gender bias could "creep" into the workplace. It isn't "at all complicated," she said.
"Most people prefer themselves. And so a decision-maker, all other things being equal, would prefer someone who looked like him," Ginsburg said.
The case heard Tuesday is the most important and far-reaching job-discrimination dispute to come before the high court in more than a decade. It could determine whether job-bias claims must proceed as individual lawsuits or instead could go ahead as broad, class-action claims that rely mostly on statistics.
The Berkeley lawyers who brought the sex-bias suit against the nation's largest retailer said about two-thirds of Wal-Mart's employees were women when the statistics were compiled five years ago, but men accounted for 86% of store managers.
The lawyers also said women were paid less across the country, even though they had more seniority on average than men.
At issue before the court was whether these findings would allow this single suit to proceed as a class-action claim on behalf of 1.6 million women who have worked for Wal-Mart since 1998. If so, it would be by far the largest job-bias case in American history.
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