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News :: Miscellaneous |
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Discrimination Suit Filed Against Wal-Mart |
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by anon via Reuters
(No verified email address) |
19 Jun 2001
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SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Six women sued Wal-Mart Stores Inc.(WMT.N) on Tuesday, charging the nation's largest private employer with systematically discriminating against hundreds of thousands of female workers in Wal-Mart and Sam's Clubs stores nationwide. |
``It's as if the last 25 years of progress for women never happened at Wal-Mart,'' said Brad Seligman of The Impact Fund, a Berkeley, Calif.-based civil rights group that helped create what is believed to be the largest sex discrimination case ever filed against a private U.S. employer.
``There is a company policy and practice across the country of sex discrimination,'' Seligman said, adding that as many as 700,000 current and former Wal-Mart employees could eventually be a part of the case if it is given class action status.
The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, charges Wal-Mart with discriminating against female employees in pay, promotion and training, and with retaliating against women employees who complain about the alleged abuse.
Wal-Mart spokesman Bill Wertz said the company flatly rejected the charge of systematic discrimination, and was confident it would win in court.
``Wal-Mart does not condone discrimination of any kind,'' Wertz said. ``The record is clear that there is no systematic practice of discrimination at Wal-Mart.''
The suit demands a court order directing Bentonville, Ark.,-based Wal-Mart to stop its allegedly discriminatory practices as well as compensation for lost wages for hundreds of thousands of women affected -- potentially making it one of the largest sex discrimination suits ever filed.
Lucky Stores, a California-based grocer, in 1995 paid
$107 million to settle a sex discrimination case that covered just 14,000 employees while Texaco paid $176 million to settle a racial discrimination complaint that applied to a class of just 1,400 former employees.
``This case is 10, 20 times as large in terms of the numbers of class members....this is off the charts,'' Seligman said.
Three current and former employees at Wal-Mart and its affiliated Sam's Club stores appeared at Tuesday's news conference to outline what they said was a pattern of discrimination by their employer.
``There have been numerous occasions that I have been aware of over the last seven years where men have been favored over women for positions,''
``There's a great divide between the women and the men at Wal-Mart,'' said Betty Dukes, a Wal-Mart employee from Pittsburg, Calif. and one of the named plaintiffs in the case. ``Today I'm speaking out and I hope the women in my store and everywhere else will have the courage and no longer accept the treatment that we've been subjected to.''
The plaintiffs say that although women comprise over 72 percent of the U.S. Wal-Mart workforce of 962,000, men account for 90 percent of Wal-Mart store manager positions. The company's global workforce numbers more than 1.24 million.
Overall, less than one-third of store management overall at Wal-Mart is female -- a percentage far lower than the number of female managers employed by Wal-Mart's major competitors, the suit charges.
Wal-Mart's Wertz said these numbers were misleading, noting that unlike some of its competitors, Wal-Mart does not categorize department managers as ``management'' because they are not salaried employees.
``If we did include these, our overall percentage would probably be closer to 50 percent,'' Wertz said.
``The point is, we don't systematically discriminate against women at WalMart. Have there been individual instances of discrimination? Yes, we're not a perfect company. But that's not what is at issue here.''
The suit also charges that Wal-Mart creates a ``sexually demeaning atmosphere'' for women employees, who are told that ''women do not make good managers'', and ``a trained monkey'' could do their jobs, a news release said.
Wal-Mart reported sales in excess of $191 billion in 2000 and has 3,153 stores in the United States. Wal-Mart employs more women than any other company in the United States. Copyright 2001 Reuters Ltd. |
