Monday the Supreme Court threw out a class action suit brought by lawyers against Walmart on behalf of its female employees — about 1.5 million individual women.
The 5-4 decision pitted the conservatives against the other four justices, with Justice Anthony Scalia writing the opinion. Constitutional lawyers believe the decision will make future claims on behalf of large, and disparate, groups of people more difficult to bring before a court.
Employer groups hailed the decision. Unions and other employee groups were dismayed.
Scalia, Roberts, et al, are surely right, however, to argue that Walmart gives its managers so much hiring and disciplinary freedom that it would be impossible to prove that all females who work for the company suffered uniformly from discriminations of one kind or another; to demonstrate, that is, that they truly are “a class” owed some kind of compensation for a wrong done to each and every one of them.
This will disappoint the lawyers who brought the case most of all. They had asked for billions in compensatory damages. An enormous amount of that award would have stuck to legal fingers before reaching the aggrieved Walmart women.
That fact, however, is not the primary reason to applaud the decision. It did the country good because the high court ruled, in effect, that it was not capable of surveying the working conditions in the 3,400 Walmart stores and deciding whether the company’s female workers were fairly treated and that laws against discrimination had been violated. The court, in other words, decided against expanding its role in shaping American society. It deserves great credit for that.
U.S. courts can and should rule on individual cases of alleged discrimination. A good class action case could be made against a company and its executives in a single plant or under a single executive executing a stated set of policies. Walmart didn’t fit.
It would be almost as easy to declare that all of the nation’s retail businesses are, in fact, governed by a single philosophy and to sue them en masse for whatever malfeasance that came to mind.
TO MY MIND the suit against Walmart was primarily political and economic, rather than legal, in its nature. It was an attempt to use the courts to enrich the women workers in a very large company at the expense of its shareholders and to establish a permanent special status for those workers which the company would be forced to recognize to avoid still more crippling lawsuits.
Our legal and political system allows labor unions to pursue and achieve such goals if they win in a contest with a company or an industry. Our industrial history tells of many such battles, won and lost.
On Monday, a majority of the high court decided, wisely in my opinion, that that’s the arena in which such contests should be waged.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
