A 60-year-old Walmart employee will come up against the world’s biggest retailer this week in another round of the largest sex discrimination case in history.
In a case legal experts say will redefine discrimination law in the US, the Supreme Court today will begin hearing arguments why Betty Dukes and more than 1 million women who worked for Walmart from December 1998 until the present should be able to sue the retailer in a class action.
Walmart is appealing against an earlier court’s decisions to let the case proceed after a judge said Dukes’ lawyers had presented “significant proof of a corporate policy of discrimination.”
Walmart, the US’ largest private employer, says the case has spun out of control and threatens to cost the retailer billions of dollar if it is allowed to proceed. The firm denies wrongdoing and argues that the accusations are too numerous and too diverse to be tried en masse.
Twenty firms — including General Electric and Microsoft — have filed papers with the court in support of Walmart. The case began in 2000 when Dukes filed a sex discrimination suit claiming she had been denied the training she needed to receive promotion.
Civil rights lawyer Brad Seligman, representing Dukes, claims Walmart systematically discriminated against female employees, who were under-represented in management positions and were paid less than male colleagues.
Whatever the Supreme Court decides is likely to have a profound impact for other groups of women bringing sex discrimination suits against employers in the US, said Melissa Hart, director of the Byron R White center for the study of US constitutional law at the University of Colorado
“It’s been decades since we have had the courts examine a case as important as this,” she said.
Hart said she expected a ruling by June and that a loss would “make it increasingly difficult for women to challenge discrimination in the workplace.”
Should the courts rule in Dukes’ favour, lawyers expect a new set of discrimination class actions to be brought, not just on behalf of women, but also for minorities or people with disabilities.
A win for Walmart would be a big blow for nationwide job-bias cases, making it harder to argue that employees who work in different stores and hold different jobs have enough in common to be a class.
Dukes started working at the retailer’s Pittsburg store in California in 1994 as a part-time cashier for US$5 an hour. She was promoted to customer service manager, but then says her path to further advancement was blocked. When she complained, arguments ensued and she was demoted. She still works for the company, earning just more than US$15 an hour.
The lawsuit claims that women account for only a third of what Walmart considers management.
According to Seligman, the representation of women in its work force drops steadily the further up in the firm. In 2001, women outnumbered men by nearly 4-1 among hourly supervisors, but comprised only 45.1 percent of the “support managers,” the highest-level hourly supervisory position.
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