Women of WalmartFollow

You do your weekly shopping on Saturday or Sunday, don't you :)




I agree with gbaji here. If the left-swinging judges felt their wasn't enough for a class-action, heartbroken as they may be about it, you know there really wasn't enough...

Do you really feel that the average middle aged female employee at Wal-mart stocking shelves and the average middle aged male employee at Wal-mart stocking shelves really have any significant difference in their potentials there at Wal-mart? Because I honestly don't. While I only have experienced half a dozen or so Superstore Wal-marts around the country, the impressions given by them have been nearly identical.

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/the-gender-pay-gap-by-industry/



http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/43426525/ns/business-personal_finance/



So we're both right. Does that mean we both aren't "painting with a broad brush?"

I never said you were wrong, exactly. I merely said it would be a better point if a gender pay gap didn't exist, and women were proportionately represented in the top echelons of business.

A gender pay gap would exist less if women didn't tend to take big chunks of time off to do babies. It would also exist less if they weren't generally emotionally charged cnuts.

Mostly the dropping in and out of the workforce thing though.

They were being generous.

You flatter yourself.

They aren't?



The problem is that our judicial system over time has placed more weight on precedent than the law itself. There has to be a balance. Precedent matters, but so does going back to the original law you are ruling on and seeing what it says. The danger of overly depending on precedent is that it allows rulings to creep past the point where the law applies.

What happens is that a judge rules that in a given case, a particular ruling can be made. Often, it's intended to be an exception. Which isn't surprising because it's usually the exceptional cases which arrive at higher courts in the first place. But what happens is that this ruling is then used as a justification to apply that same process to a case which isn't an exception, or for which the exception isn't as strong. That ruling is in turn used as precedent for the next, and the next, and the next.

Eventually, you end up in a situation where a judge, following a long history of precedent, can make a ruling saying (for example) that the government absolutely can seize your properly simply because it can generate more tax revenue if your property were owned by a shopping center than as a residence. In that particular case (Kelo v New London in case you are interested), the original exception was a condition of urban blight. The state (local government in this case) could step in and seize property in an extreme case of poor condition in order to revitalize the whole area. But part of the justification for this (in addition to reducing crime, and raising property values in the surrounding areas) was that the city had an interest in doing this because it collected property taxes and was thus negatively affected by the blighted areas. A series of rulings progressively marched that precedent one step at a time until in the ruling I mentioned, the *only* criteria needed to justify seizure of property was whether or not the city could earn more revenue if it was in someone else's hands.


There are other examples, but that's one of the most clear cut. In the case of class action suites for discrimination, the danger is that we get ourselves in a state where all we need is to have a very very small percentage of an employee population file claims of discrimination, and this can trigger a class action suit (which assumes it's systemic). Had the court ruled differently, we could expect to see nearly every large company in the country embroiled in massive class action suits. Because in any large company, there will always be a "handful" of suits out there. It's impossible to avoid, not matter how well the company sets policy and how well it enforces it.


Precedent is not always a good thing. It's useful for setting some basic parameters for the law in a given case, but far too often our judges just act in a rote manner based on precedent and fail to apply common sense, or look back at the original law (or even the starting point of the precedent chain). Worse, many judges seem to want to rule on those precedent-setting cases. Within judicial circles, status is often conferred based on whether or not your cases are referenced by future cases, so there's some pressure to push that envelop a step further. And of course, lawyers know this and will often attempt to bring cases to trial specifically to set up a precedent-setting situation, hoping to get a judge that'll make that next step and make them all (semi) famous.

Thankfully, in this case, the court did the right thing. The scary thing though is that the precedent making machine never stops. In another decade or two, the exact same case might result in the opposite ruling, purely because between now and then law firms will bring more cases similar to this (but not as extreme), and will work to build that precedent in the hopes of changing that future ruling. Like I said, precedent has it's place, but can also be very very dangerous. We should always look at the law first and only use precedent as a guide, never as a rulebook.