Systemic Discrimination is Legal as long as you are Large
Welcome to the New United States.
Trust that Jared Bernstein (if this one shows up, instead of this one) will have more on how much future damage can be done to the economy.
UPDATE: Scott Lemieux weighs in, correctly seeing it as worse than any reasonable examination of the facts would have permitted*:
Systematic discrimination at a large corporation such as Wal-Mart simply cannot be addressed piecemeal. I could have lived with a ruling that focused on the unique facts of this case. But in their broad ruling, the Court’s five most conservative justices have made it much more difficult for civil rights laws to be meaningfully enforced in practice. It will be part of the classic conservertarian bait-and-switch: individuals filing lawsuits will not have enough evidence to prove discrimination, and class action suits that develop systematic evidence will be thrown out for not having enough in common.
Between this and Andrew Samwick’s recent declaration that the rule of law should not apply in the United States, it’s a good week for the youngsters among our readers to check out this site.
*Although, as is becoming far too usual, on par with my cynicism being optimistic.
sheer discrimination against the women. we must condemn this otherwise we may become a victim of this evil
live pakistan news
Faaiez,
What do you know of The Revolutionary Association Women of the Women of Afghanistan [RAWA]; are they who they claim to be? Do they have enough gravity to make a difference? Most importantly, is the Organization a false front being steered by Washington or Langley and really more public relations than change on the ground oeiented?
Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA)
On thread, people I’ve known who worked for WalMart – and other ‘big box’ retailers – have all felt to be wage discriminated, often working more than full-time hours for part-time pay — but then there may be no ‘full-time hours’ in modern retrogressing America. [which can for a while longer try to retain hegemony on the back of hundreds of billions of dollars/yr wastage in means of destruction and outmoded national security doctrine]
http://www.rawa.org/index.php
A link might help –
RAWA
http://www.rawa.org/index.php
No one today in business or government has a “policy of discrimination”. Lots of businesses and some government agencies discriminate against members of protected groups by simply not managing their workforces correctly. This is because passive acceptance of prohibited personnel practices (the federal legal term for discrimination under Title VII) is discrimination. Management at the highest level is responsible for its chain of command and has a duty to monitor your subordinate managers’ and supervisors’ actions to detect and prevent wrongful acts.
So, to hold your hands up and say, “Oh, my! I had no idea anything like this was going on! These bad apples are on their own. Nothing we at headquarters said or did could possibly have produced widespread violations of the FLSA, other work place protections, and Title VII! And, oh noes, we had no idea that this was going on! Don’t be mad! Sue the supervisors! We had nothing to do with it!” Biggest retail business in the world with stores all over the country (and some foreign countries) and who could have known this would happen?!
This is ridiculous. NancyOrtiz
http://www.slate.com/id/2126/landing/1 Another POV on the same topic. NancyO
Mark:
On the whole Walmart may not have had a printed policy; but, there actions were not “fair and consistent” when viewing actions between men and women. This has been the hallmark in these types of cases. It might have been better to go after each store piece meal and also lunch civil suit.
It is not a finding of non-discrimination. It is a ruling that the individual named employees can pursue their actions individually but can’t represent all non-white-male employees because they failed to show any company-wide practice that was discriminatory.
Merely showing differences in pay, period, is not enough to prove liability in employment discrimination, before or after this case. You have to show a practice that caused the difference – e.g., “hostile environment”. And if you want to represent thousands of people, you have to show the practice operated as to the thousands. They didn’t.
They had some junk science from a sociologist about the “culture” of WalMart to try to carry their burden. That got tossed and rightfully so. It’s not science. It’s ironic to read the blog post after this one, crowing about a takedown of Gary Becker, when this litigation is also about junk science.
And the history of “civil rights in this country” is largely one against de jure discrimination not de facto.
Look, I don’t work for WMT, never owned its stock, never shopped in one and don’t like it, period. And I am a registered Democrat. But this is not a twist of the rules or a biased decision. It’s 9-0. It merely applies the rules that already existed and that someone was trying to get around with creative lawyering. A lot of reflexive populist drivel gets spilled because people hear catch phrases like “female employees” and “discrimination” and Walmart is a big company and easy target for populists,so people think “oh, evil is being done”. But as procedures of litigation go, this result wasn’t a stretch at all.
This comment does not understand the decision. The individual cases can go forward. Statements like “passive acceptance of prohibited personnel practices (the federal legal term for discrimination under Title VII) is discrimination. Management at the highest level is responsible for its chain of command and has a duty to monitor your subordinate managers’ and supervisors’ actions to detect and prevent wrongful acts.” are not apposite because the decision does not limit liability if those things are proven. It simply says the worker can only represent himself or herself and not all non-white-male workers unless he or she can show a company-wide practice that is affecting people other than himself or herself.
Understand the workers’ argument here was that, if the five people who were plaintiffs could show they were discriminated against, and an expert tesitified it probably happened to others, then, based on that alone, the jury should conclude that everyone in the class was discriminated against – without any further proof about anyone else. That’s wildly aggressive as the procedures of litigation go and the result is not a shock. If you want to defend that, be my guest. But your comments are really not on point.
So therefore, let Walmart hold us all hostage and violate the rules all they want — or at least the rules as they long have been understood until this group re-wrote the rules for the political result it always wants. We once thought Kennedy was a reasonable centrist who would be a legitimate swing vote. But now it seems he’s permanently pissed because women called him patronizing, as he clearly was, in the late-term abortion decision. So now he seems to programmed by personal pique to follow robotically whatever line Scalia is pushing to protect business.
Walmart is an exytraordinarily deserving target for populists — i.e., for those who actually care about what will work for 99% of the people. Those who use “populist” as a pejorative are carrying water for the other 1%, whether they know it or not.
Stop being a dupe. Do some research.
Your statement of the workers’ argument is blatantly false. Their argument was consistent with 50 years of jurisprudence on Title VII, as both lower courts found. Scalia’s opinion was directly contrary to that history. Hmm, 65% of Walmart workers are women. 10% are store managers, 4% are district managers, 5% are headqurters managers. Hey, no pattern there. Only a fuzzy advocate of junk “social science” could imagine that a pattern exists. After all, Walmart says it will not discriminate, and that should be good enough.
MarK:
I am going to object agin. There was proof of a pattern and practice to discriminate against women with regard to similar occupations with regard to men in respect to lesser salary or availability of the position to women with respect to the numbers in those positions. In that respect are women being treated as fairly and consistently as men? Statistically, the answer would be no. The numbers do not present a fair and consistent manner and in fact represent a pattern and practice of denying women an equal riht to similar opportunities.
WalMart can not declare the Nuremburg Defense of not knowing what their underlings, der soldats of the corporacy, are doing and neither can these underlings declare a lack of knowledge of discrimintion laws as protection. Both groups are liable and in the end do is WalMart the corporation.
I do not believe SCOTUS they can sue each store in groups of that store. SCOTUS more than likely declared they can not do it in mass. I expect to see multiples of lawsuits launched against each store wich WalMart will settle. They are guilty.