杏吧原创 expert believes the cases don鈥檛 satisfy the Supreme Court鈥檚 test
In a second legal step after the U.S. Supreme Court turned down a national class action discrimination lawsuit filed against Wal-Mart on behalf of more than a million female employees, a series of statewide class action lawsuits are being launched. But Law School professor believes these new lawsuits will fail for the same reasons the nationwide suit did.
鈥淭he women in each of the new suits do not have anything in common with one another,鈥� said Fitzpatrick. 鈥淏ecause Wal-Mart delegated decision-making to local store managers, the litigation will have to go forward on a store-by-store basis in order to satisfy the Supreme Court鈥檚 commonality test.鈥�
So far, women representing current and former female Wal-Mart employees have filed two new smaller lawsuits claiming sex discrimination in pay, one in California and another in Texas. Rather than bringing together all of Wal-Mart鈥檚 female employees, the suits bring together all of Wal-Mart鈥檚 female employees in a particular region.
What went wrong in the national suit
This past June, the Supreme Court held that the lawsuit could not be maintained as a class action.聽The Court said the claims by the 1.5 million women did not have anything in common since Wal-Mart delegated discretion hiring and promotion decision-making to local store managers, thus, the Court held, there was nothing binding all of the women鈥檚 claims together.
鈥淸rquote]In these cases, the employment decisions were made in the discretion of thousands of local store managers.[/rquote] Normally, that sort of individualization defeats commonality, but, the plaintiffs allege that not having a centralized employment practice was a company policy common to all the women’s cases–that is, that聽Wal-Mart essentially had a policy not to have a policy,鈥� said Fitzpatrick.
These cases involve what may be the largest employment discrimination case in American history, where hundreds of thousands–if not millions–of women have sued聽Wal-Mart for gender discrimination.
鈥淚f the Court ruled on the side of the plaintiffs, the potential damages in the case may be in the billions of dollars, which places the case in rarefied company,鈥� said Fitzpatrick.聽鈥淚n my empirical in federal court from 2006-2007, there were only eight settlements for a billion dollars or more.鈥�