I was pleased to learn yesterday that the Supreme Court turned down the class action lawsuit alleging that Wal-Mart (cue scary music) discriminated against its female employees by giving them less pay than the male workers for the same jobs. The four-year old gender discrimination suit which included over one million plaintiffs, Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. was denied to proceed as a class-action lawsuit, but suggested the lawsuit could be pursued by individual plaintiffs.
I think the court was right to turn the lawsuit down. 1.6 million plaintiffs? Yeah right. I doubt many of those women were paid less simply because they were women, but for more legitimate reasons. If Wal-Mart paid women less than men for performing the same tasks, why hire men at all? Sounds like a waste of money. I’ve seen lots of men at Wal-Mart, often working the same jobs alongside their female counterparts, working at the checkout and restocking shelves.
If I owned a business and believed I could pay women less for doing the same job as a man, I’d be the only guy on the payroll! One of the complaints filed against Wal-Mart was that female workers were paid minimum wage. I think at least a few hundred thousand of those women were just looking to make some quick cash off an easy scapegoat while others were led to believe they were discriminated against when more reasonable reasons exist for their earning less money.
Class-action lawsuits are allowed in our court system when scores of victims are seeking justice from a single perpetrator. But it is too often abused as a way to pressure big companies to settle instead of battle the suit through court after court. The more plaintiffs there are in the suit, the more bad press the corporation receives and thus the more pressure is placed upon them to end the lawsuit quickly, even if it means cutting a settlement checkrather than being found guilty in court and having thaton the company’s public record. Wal-Mart has already had its share of bad press from both actual and alleged violations of civil and criminal law.
The plaintiffs in class-action lawsuits often stand little to gain from a settlement or a court judgment in their favor, as the money won is divided among the plaintiffs, after the lawyers get their cut. The more plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit, the less money each individual plaintiff receives. Dukes v. Wal-Mart, however, had more than one million plaintiffs suing for billions of dollars, making even a lengthy court battle cheaper than settling. The other factor in this lawsuit being dropped was that the sheet number of complainants made it impossible to verify how each and every one were discriminated against, and even the Supreme Court admitted from examining the evidence that the validity of the allegations of some of the plaintiffs were hazy at best.
The only clear winners in a class-action lawsuit are the trial lawyers, who of course take a cut of the winnings before it even reaches the hands of the actual victims, alleged or otherwise. But don’t feel too bad for these lawyers who endedtheir class-action lawsuit without seeing a financial payoff; chances are their next suit will be a success and will subsidize the losses from this one.
Entries (RSS)
January 5th, 2012 at 5:28 pm
Could it have been Lao-tzu, The Way of Lao-tzu who was responsible for saying the following -He who knows does not speak.
He who speaks does not know.