Wal-Mart wins Supreme Court sex-bias ruling

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Supreme Court rejected a mammoth class-action lawsuit charging sex discrimination at Wal-Mart Stores Inc on Monday in a ruling that could affect major cases in other industries.

The justices unanimously overturned a U.S. appeals court ruling that more than a million female employees nationwide could join in the lawsuit accusing Wal-Mart of paying women less and giving them fewer promotions and seeking billions of dollars.

The Supreme Court agreed with the giant American retailer that the class-action certification violated federal rules for such lawsuits.

It accepted Wal-Mart's argument that the female employees in different jobs at 3,400 different stores nationwide and with different supervisors do not have enough in common to be lumped together in a single class-action lawsuit.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110620/bs_nm/us_walmart_lawsuit

This is disgusting. I worked on a Wal-Mart sex discrimination case 20 years ago and nothing has changed.

"The court's ruling erects substantially higher barriers for working women and men to vindicate rights to be free from employment discrimination," the plaintiffs said in a statement, stressing that the decision does not address whether Wal-Mart committed sex discrimination.

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Corporate defense attorneys said the ruling was a major victory for employers. "The decision pokes a big hole in the balloon of class actions for employment cases," said Michael Droke of Dorsey & Whitney LLP in Seattle. "Employers are literally breathing a collective sigh of relief."

I have a good friend from high school who works as a corporate lawyer for WalMart, and she has complained rather bitterly the entire time she's worked for them that they promote men they assign to her to train, they must be paying the men much more, since they can afford to live in far, far nicer homes than she can. I honestly don't understand why she tolerates this, why she has not been part of that class-action suit. And, get this: she's a liberal democrat just like us here on DU. I think it just shows how easily people are co-opted by whoever pays them into go along with whatever.