• 27
  • August
    2010

Atlanta employment litigation attorneys are following the ongoing employment litigation by current and former employees of Wal-Mart against the megastore chain. Wal-Mart requested a review of the case by the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday. The case has the potential to be the largest employment discrimination court case in American history, involving more than a million female employees of Wal-Mart and Sam's Club stores.

The issue that would be before the court would not be whether discrimination occurred, but whether more than a million people can make the claim jointly, as opposed individual claims or claims in smaller groups.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco ruled 6-5 in April that the lawsuit...

could proceed as a class action. They were the fourth court to say so.

Employment litigation attorneys say that If the Supreme Court allows the suit to proceed as a class action, the case could easily cost Wal-Mart $1 billion or more in damages.

The lawsuit is titled Dukes v. Wal-Mart. Some of the plaintiffs still work at Wal-Mart, others have left.

The genesis of the case was when one woman, Stephanie Odle, was upset to discover that the top manager at the Sam's Club where she worked as an assistant store manager had been administering a promotion test to the three male assistant store managers but not to her.

Ms. Odle had previously foun out that a male assistant manager at a previous Sam's Club where she worked had been earning $23,000 more a year than she was. Her district manager told her, "Stephanie, that assistant manager has a family and two children to support."

"I told him, 'I'm a single mother, and I have a 6-month-old child to support,' " she recalled in an interview.