An en banc panel of the Ninth Circuit on Monday upheld by a 6-5 vote a lower court’s decision to certify a class of female workers who allege gender discrimination over pay for workers. Click here for the AP story; here for the Reuters story; here for the Ninth Circuit opinion, written by Judge Michael Daly Hawkins.
In upholding the class certification, the court gave the go-ahead to a huge lawsuit alleging that Wal-Mart, the world’s largest private employer, will have to face charges that it pays women less than men for the same jobs and that female employees receive fewer promotions and have to wait longer for those promotions than male counterparts.
Wal-Mart had argued that the number of litigants that the lawsuit purports to represent is too big to defend.
“Although the size of this class action is large, mere size does not render a case unmanageable,” said Hawkins.
Judge Sandra Ikuta wrote a blistering dissent, joined by four of her colleagues.
“No court has ever certified a class like this one, until now. And with good reason,” Ikuta wrote. “In this case, six women who have worked in thirteen of Wal-Marts 3,400 stores seek to represent every woman who has worked in those stores over the course of the last decade — a class estimated in 2001 to include more than 1.5 million women.”
via Huge Class Action To Go Forward Against Wal-Mart – Law Blog – WSJ.
