I was talking to one of my friends the other day and he mentioned that there was a huge law suit dealing with gender discrimination in wages concerning women at Wal-Mart. I found a video on YouTube from PBS News Hour that I watched to learn more about what was going on with the courtroom and how the lawsuit was coming along. Apparently the first decision to be made wasn't whether or not to look into Wal-Mart's policies on discrimination and if there was actual wage discrimination against the women who worked for the company. Instead, they were deciding whether or not they were actually going to take on the case and advance it to the Supreme Court.
One woman brought forward her story and five other women joined her to file the lawsuit against Wal-Mart. They all felt that they should have been receiving raises and promotions to managerial positions before some of the men in the store because they had worked there longer and they were eligible for the pay increase. So now Wal-Mart could potentially lose billions of dollars if the case is picked up by the Supreme Court.
Apparently class action is the one way that helps these women actually have a case against Wal-Mart because if each woman was to try and file a worker's discrimination case on their own, it is very likely that it will be dismissed. Since there are so many different women who have come forward stating that they have experienced unfair pay at Wal-Mart, some people are saying that it is hard to pin just one policy that was being broken because these women are not all from the same store...they are from all over.
If you want to know more about this hearing...watch the video!
An article was published on www.nytimes.com titled When a Lawsuit is Too Big that describes the process of how the courts made their decision whether or not to take the case to the Supreme Court. Apparently it is too difficult for the courts to handle such a large and "improbable" claim, so it turns out that the case was settled for $3 billion. This just proves that we may not see any change in the wage gap, especially in companies such as Wal-Mart.
Here is the link to the article:
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