Yesterday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a massive employment discrimination case against Wal-Mart could go forward. The dispute over the nearly decade-old case centered on whether it was appropriate for the plaintiffs to be "certified" as a class, which is necessary for the courts to proceed with the case. One of the central questions in certification is a determination as to whether a class action is the appropriate method to go about litigating the case. Wal-Mart claims that the number of plaintiffs is simply too large -- over a million strong.
The lawsuit alleges that Wal-Mart discriminated against female employees by systematically paying them less than male employees of similar seniority in similar positions. Much of the coverage of the decision has characterized the suit as the "biggest employment discrimination case in the nation's history."
There's a question of scale here. For purposes of litigation, is a lawsuit with 5,000 members in the class qualitatively different from a lawsuit with a million? In either, it's not practical or possible for the court to consider the claims of each class member. Either the members of the class have similar claims that should be adjudicated together, or they don't. If they do, then it doesn't matter how many of them there are.
And although it's true that the number of individuals in the class is the largest for any employment-discrimination case, it's not even in the running for the largest class action. There are larger cases in the field of consumer law, like lawsuits against Verizon and Sprint for charging excessive fees to millions of customers.
Focusing on the number of members in the class is missing the point. Unless it's the case that employment discrimination is never an appropriate subject for a class action, we should focus on the kinds of claims these women are making rather than their number. Frankly, if you're going to make a claim that a company has systematically discriminated against a group, it only makes sense to file a class action. The number is unprecedented, but the legal principles aren't. In fact, it's exactly what a class action was designed to do
You can read the decision for yourself here.
--Silvana Naguib
