Articles Posted in Sex Discrimination

On December 6, 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court decided to review a case from California called Dukes v. Wal-Mart. Dukes is a class action in which the plaintiffs claim that Wal-Mart engaged in a widespread practice of sex discrimination. They claim that Wal-Mart discriminated against women with respect to job assignments, pay decisions and training; and retaliates against women who complain about such practices.

The Supreme Court, however, will not decide whether Wal-Mart discriminated against its female employees. Instead, it will decide whether the plaintiffs can bring their case, on behalf of about 500,000 women who worked for Wal-Mart, in the form of a class action. Class actions make it easier for large groups of people to receive compensation when employers violate their rights. For that reason, employers routinely seek to prevent class actions. They try to force employees to bring their cases individually.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, in California, decided that the class action could go forward. However, five of the eleven judges on that court believed that the class action should not go forward. Some people who regularly follow the Supreme Court believe that the Supreme Court, due to its bias against class action cases, will reverse the Ninth Circuit’s decision.

Maine’s U.S. Senators, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, voted with the rest of the Republican party today to filibuster the Paycheck Fairness Act. The filibuster effectively killed this piece of legislation. Members of Congress drafted the Paycheck Fairness Act to address persistent wage inequality between men and women. Even though women make-up half of the American workforce, they only earn $0.77 for every $1.00 paid to men.

The Paycheck Fairness Act would have closed loopholes in the current law which employers exploit. It would have added protections for women and, consequently, deterred employers from discriminating against women. In particular, the Paycheck Fairness Act would have required an employer to state legitimate, non-discriminatory, reasons for its decision to pay women less than men for the same job. It would have prevented employers from discriminating against employees who share information about their salaries–one of the primary ways women discover pay discrimination. It would have also required employers to compensate victims of pay discrimination for all of the losses they suffered.

The opponents to the bill cited problems with it that they claim would have unfairly hurt businesses. Given the fact that employers who pay men and women the same would not have violated the law, this seems dubious.