On the Gender Discrimination Lawsuit against Walmart
In case you haven’t heard, some 12,000 individual claims by women of pay/promotion discrimination against Walmart have been lumped together into one class-action lawsuit. These women were suing on behalf of all female employees of Walmart within the past decade, a total of 1.4 million employees. The SC ruled unanimously that the circumstances of 1.4 million employees in different positions under different supervisors cannot seriously be lumped together. In a partial dissent, four “liberal” judges seem to believe it was wrong to dismiss the 1.5 million women as a class without letting them make a case for being considered a class. See Reuters and Associated Press reports for some background, or go straight to the SCOTUS blog.
This is one of those moments when I can’t help but think our system of thought is polarized and broken. I have an inherent dislike for Walmart, and just because I work for a competitor, but in all honesty it is fair to rule in favor of Walmart here. Our courts are supposed to set very high bars for determining guilt — innocent until proven guilty. If there is not a clearly measurable way to determine specific claims of discrimination, then by all rights the case should be thrown right out.
Walmart may indeed be guilty of gender discrimination. Heck, Walmart may indeed be guilty of many, many things in order to maintain their low prices, from bad employment conditions to throwing their weight around to get their stock from other countries at ridiculously low prices, thus shortchanging the poor overseas who work to make those 5-dollar t-shirts possible. Yes, Walmart may indeed be guilty. But the SC cannot rule based on anything other than clearly demonstrable evidence.
What effect will this decision have on class-action lawsuits in general?
It seems they will need to be rather specific with a clear common thread and a similar grievance given. If there are 1.5 million women employed by Walmart in the last decade, and only 12,000 or so file claims, one must wonder how statistically significant that is. A good statistical sample size is about 5% of the population you wish to analyze. However, that would be a hefty number of claims. 12,000 claims, honestly, is not statistically significant enough to determine with enough confidence what the issue is. Even though it’s theoretically possible that they’re all bogus claims, that’s not at all what I’m arguing. But 12,000 is a meager .8% of 1.5 million. That is nowhere near enough to get even a representative sample. We’d need to analyze at least 75,000 cases for that to work. The sheer immensity of this sort of lawsuit makes it an outrageous struggle.
From now on, class-action lawsuits will have to be done in more specific chunks. One may not simply refer to [demographic] vs. [huge corporation]. This does not make it impossible to bring down large corporations. Enough smaller-scale class-action lawsuits simultaneously in session would still be effective in delivering justice. If indeed all 12,000 of these cases are clearly as the plaintiffs suggest, they can still get justice. If they all win, it will definitely be enough of a PR blow for Walmart that the company would have to seriously revamp things.
So, while future class-action lawsuits may require a smaller scale, this SC decision does not make it impossible to get justice for legitimate class grievances.
Honestly, I’m not sure if this decision makes litigation easier or harder for the SC, for employees as plaintiffs, or for companies as defendants. It will complicate matters and require more lawsuits. The clear winners in this decision are the lawyers.
How this kerfuffle manifests our ridiculous polarization
Looking at the blogosphere is a fair way to determine how people can look at the same situation and see two completely different things. Really, you don’t even have to do that. The 5-4 split in the court shows that regardless of how knowledgeable our SC justices may be, the ideological majority still sometimes wins. Influence in law boils down to politics. While there may be exceptions, I think this case is rather the rule. Sadly, our law system is at the mercy of whichever political party manages to install the most of “their” Supreme Court justices.
Our legal-political system is organized chaos at best. But it’s better than anarchy, at least. Better for ideologies to fight with words in a drawn-out court battle than with swords and clubs.
Filed under: Human Rights, Men's Rights, Politics, Women's Rights | Leave a Comment
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