Washington, March 30: Hundreds of thousands of female workers at the world’s biggest retail store chain in the United States, Wal-Mart, have taken the giant corporation to the US Supreme Court over alleged gender discrimination.
The lawsuit was firstly filed by Betty Dukes, a Wal-Mart cashier who charged her employer with sex discrimination for what was called a corporate culture of sexism where most managers are men and most workers women, getting less pay and fewer promotions than their male counterparts doing the same jobs, a Media correspondent reported on Tuesday.
“I brought this case because I believed there was a pattern of discrimination at Wal-Mart not just in my store but I believe it is across the country,” said Dukes.
Now Wal-Mart’s female workers are asking the country’s highest court for permission to sue Wal-Mart as a group or class instead of individuals.
If the Supreme Court gives the green light, 1.6 million former and current Wal-Mart workers will be able to file a class action lawsuit which could result in tens of millions of dollars in damages and back pay, and it would be the largest employee sex discrimination lawsuit in US history.
For years, the female workers have been complaining about gender discrimination, but Wal-Mart claims it leaves it up to the individual store managers and is not responsible if there is discrimination.
Lawyers for each side have argued if Wal-Mart women should be allowed to file a class action lawsuit or not.
“We brought the case in this size because we were challenging company-wide practices that consistently discriminated against women in every one of the regions in which the company does business in this country,” said Wal-Mart Women’s Attorney Joseph Sellers.
If the court approves the case as a class action lawsuit, the Dukes versus Wal-Mart case will involve female workers in 3400 Wal-Mart stores, and potentially could end up involving all women who have worked at America’s biggest retail store chain over 20 years.
The US Supreme Court is expected to hand down a decision in a matter of weeks.
——–Agencies