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A clarification from an NPR blog:


Guess I'm going to have to find out what this 23(a) has to say.

I can not, for the life of me, see how anyone actually wronged by a company, would want a class action suit. They don't benefit from it. The only ones who benefit are those who weren't/barely wronged, lawyers, and companies who screwed up and get off by only having to defend and pay out once.

Edited, Jun 20th 2011 2:54pm by Uglysasquatch

Yeah, it's incredibly absurd that women expect to be paid and treated the same as men. What are they thinking??

What's absurd is that an incredibly small number of women (a "handful" according to the article) can claim discrimination and some special interest group(s) will attempt to turn it into a class action lawsuit so that they can push a broader agenda. You get that they basically used these women, right?

The only people who benefit from this had they succeeded would have been the law firm handling the case, and those who would immediately start up class action suits on behalf of women who'd never complained about anything at all purely because one or two women in a company did. And they'd largely get screwed to. But the legal folks get a boatload of cash, the evil big businesses lose some cash, and the ideologues get another issue to turn into political capital.

So, had it been a million women that were discriminated against and spoke up, you'd be ok with it? And the "broader agenda" seems to be the same as the smaller agenda... ending sexual discrimination.



No, I don't.



Admittedly, I don't know a ton about class action lawsuits. But it seems to me that if there is discrimination going on, then women across the country would benefit from them winning this case.

I just assumed that, as usual, you were using words without knowing what they meant given your naive little "Judge each case on its own merits!" statement. As you prove every time there's a discussion about legal matters, just because you use a term doesn't mean you have the slightest clue what it means.

No, Gbaji, each case is not judged in a bubble; it is judged partially on higher court precedent before it and lower court rulings during appeals. That's a pretty huge part of our judicial system. Now you can pretend that you knew this while backpedaling and pretending you never wrote what you wrote. Have fun.

Edited, Jun 20th 2011 2:40pm by Jophiel

Of course. Because there would actually be a million women with claims of being discriminated against, instead of just a handful in a company which employs over two million people. See, a "class action lawsuit" is intended for cases where a large number of people are affected by something. It should not be used where a very very tiny number of people claim to be affected but you attempt to make a mountain out of said molehill.

Which, btw, is what the Supreme Court agreed on unanimously.



Sure. And if a million women had been discriminated against on the basis of their gender, you'd have a valid argument. But they weren't.




Ok. Let me spell it out for you. Had each woman filed her own lawsuit on the ground of discrimination, each case would be judged on its own merit. So if Sally was hit on by her boss, denigrated, called names, and passed up for promotion, she'd have a strong case and likely get quite a bit of cash. But maybe Jennie just didn't get as big a raise as she thought she wanted, and well... she's not a very good employee and is late all the time, talks back to the customers, and perhaps didn't actually deserve the raise she thought she did. And 50 other women at the same store have no complaints and can't be shown to be treated any differently than the men.

With a class action lawsuit, what you're doing is arguing not on the grounds of each individual case, but attempting to show that the company as a whole has institutionalized policies which discriminate (or harm in some way) everyone in some manner. So all women are affected by sexual discrimination, for example. Or all customers were harmed by a faulty product. Whatever. What happens is that a law firm bundles all the cases they have into one case and if they win, there's a huge settlement. But that settlement is divided among every single named person. Which in this case would be every female working at WalMart (which is something like 1.4 million.

The result is that each person gets like $50 or so. So Sally gets screwed.

See how that works?

Feeling that you were discriminated against and actually being discriminated against are two completely different things. Opining in general (i.e. not specifically on this case), I'd venture a guess that women, especially non-white women, feel that they are being discriminated against much more strongly and frequently than is actually the case (weight/attractiveness probably factor in as well to some degree).

There might be more of a point here if the wage-gap between men and women didn't exist. Or if more women were executives at companies.

The opposite really. An individual lawsuit might cost the company a few thousand dollars to settle. Maybe a few tens of thousands for a really bad case. Companies will usually settle those directly because it's cheaper to pay off the person than to fight it in court (and potentially deal with the negative publicity). A class action lawsuit with the potential to cost billions of dollars? They're going to fight that. Hard.

And as I pointed out earlier, the award is split evenly between all those in the lawsuit, so the handful of people who did actually suffer discrimination and might have been able to sue for tens of thousands of dollars each (and would likely get that money), now get maybe a few hundred. Those who actually suffered some direct harm get very very little and a whole bunch of people who didn't have anything bad happen to them but happened to be the right gender, bought the right product, or whatever, get free money.


Class action lawsuits generally only benefit the lawyers. In very very very rare cases where a company is doing something truly harmful, they might be useful. But most of the time they don't serve any actual social benefit, ***** over those who were actually harmed in some way, cost the company (and thus the customers of that company) lots of money, and make a pretty large bank for the law firm.

That's an awfully broad brush you're painting with.

From what I understand (and most sources are reporting) is that there something around a million claims of sexual discrimination in one form or another. I'm not sure why gbaji latched onto this handful thing. That's simply the people who brought forward the original suit. "A handful" doesn't make a class-action suit.

It was merely the first handful that stepped up and agreed to get the ball rolling.

The debate seems to be about weather Walmart can be sued for discrimination based on lots of different kinds of complaints from lots of different stores/chains, as, presumably they all dictate their own personnel policies, somewhat independently.

Disallowing this suit just really leaves a lot of uncertainty about responsibility of large multi-entity companies. How many Walmarts, or how many Sam's Club managers would have to be successfully sued for sexual discrimination before one could point at the umbrella company as having some liability in the way they operate? ...or can't they. ever?

I will now not shop at WAL MART for at least another 5 days in support of the women of the store.