Wal-Mart will pay $11.7 million to settle discrimination suit

[babylonsister]

I know, chump change, but still...

Wal-Mart will pay $11.7 million to settle discrimination suit

By Bill Estep and Dori Hijalmarson | Lexington Herald-Leader

The country's largest private employer, retail giant Wal-Mart Stores Inc., will pay $11.7 million to settle a federal discrimination suit that claimed the company passed over women for a certain position at its London, Ky., warehouse.

Federal officials said they think the settlement is the largest ever against Wal-Mart in a single discrimination lawsuit.

The complaint was filed in 2001 by the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on behalf of Wal-Mart employee Janice Smith. Smith alleged that supervisors at the Wal-Mart distribution center hired mostly men ages 18 to 25 for the position of "order filler" and passed over Smith's transfer request because she is a woman. Since then, the EEOC has added at least six other women to the suit, and thousands more might be eligible for back pay if they applied for jobs and were not hired between Jan. 1, 1998, and Feb. 15, 2005.

The number of eligible women will be determined in the coming months, said Nancy Dean Edmonds, lead attorney for the EEOC. A commission expert estimated that between 71 percent and 82 percent of female applicants were rejected for the job based on "'common' female names" on job applications, court records indicate. The disproportionate number of men in the job was "statistically significant and highly unlikely to have occurred by chance," the EEOC argued.

The company does not admit any wrongdoing, according to the terms of the settlement. A trial in the suit had been scheduled to start Monday, but the settlement was agreed to instead.

more...

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/03/02/89720/wal-mart-will-pay-117-million.html

[heli]

1. Wal-Mart's last quarter profit = $4.63 billion

It's practically meaningless to them.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

11. Yeah, but if one hundred employees file similar claims...

...it'll sting!

[ParkieDem]

12. Yep.

And how much of that goes to attorneys' fees for the plaintiffs' lawyers?

[TwilightGardener]

2. Good. I have run into this in my own life, in various jobs I've held--

some jobs (usually the best ones, that involve some skill) are basically reserved for men. I just didn't have the will to file suit. Good for those ladies.

[bighart]

3. This isn't one of those "best jobs", it's back breaking manual labor.

[TwilightGardener]

4. Can't tell you how many times I've been shunted off behind a cash register

when I'd rather do "back breaking" labor in other areas of the places I've worked. Some women like to do physical work and get their hands dirty.

[bighart]

5. I understand that.

Just saying this isn't a job I would want to do. Pulling and stacking cases of merchandise on pallets all day with ridiculous quotas to meet. I have never done the job but know half a dozen people, both male and female, that have done the job at one WM distribution center. All of them either quit or found other jobs in the DC. Pay is good but the job sucks from what they tell me. You ever stacked a few hundred cases of motor oil, laundry detergent or canned goods, I have done that and it's no fun.

[TwilightGardener]

9. Yes, I've done some similiar work--used to stock shelves at a couple

of places, rearranged a store as an overnight temp. My last job actually involved hauling sacks of grain (I have the pinched nerves in my cervical spine to prove it). Some jobs are worse than others, though--my husband only lasted a few weeks on a job he had during college, loading trucks for a parcel carrier in the middle of the night. He was young and in shape, but it still whooped his butt. They had to be really strong and FAST. I couldn't physically do that. But if these women are physically capable and are willing, they should not have their applications tossed in the trash automatically for being female. And sometimes these jobs will entail some good skills, like operating a forklift.

[blondeatlast]

6. Indeed. In my retail days, I MUCH preferred stocking to

the cash wrap.

[bighart]

7. We are not talking about stocking shelves here.

We are talking about order fillers at a distribution center loading merchandise on pallets that then get put on trucks and shipped to the stores. You get assigned a certain product category and that is what you pull and stack all day every day. Stocking shelves is much easier than this job.

[bighart]

8. Not defending Wal-Mart's discrimination here, just saying this job

is not one that would be high on my list.

[blondeatlast]

13. I did the same sort of thing at a library. do you have ANY clue what a box/

pallet of books weighs?

I LOVED it--far more than cash wrapping and checkout.

[progressoid]

10. A drop in the ocean for them. They'll manage to make that up on the sweat of their workers quickly