One only wishes that its Chinese suppliers do the same.
Of course, it's all to be decided in the Anglo-Saxon era law courts. Yeah right.
Patti Waldmeir: Wal-Mart women take to class war By Patti Waldmeir Published: January 19 2005 18:42 | Last updated: January 19 2005 18:42
I am a woman and I love Wal-Mart. I guess that makes me a traitor to my class.
Because a "class" of 1.5m of my fellow females is trying to sue the world's most maligned corporation for treating them worse than men. Theirs is the biggest mass employment lawsuit in history but it is about much more than sex. If the women of Wal-Mart succeed in humbling the world's biggest corporation it could alter the balance of power between bosses and workers throughout America. Forget unions: in the 21st century, workers of the world unite in court.
Wal-Mart is full of overworked, underpaid, stressed single mothers - on both sides of the cash register. Wal-Marts are located in areas where there is no cultural divide between the buyers and the sellers: they are all, for the most part, poor, under-educated and struggling to pay for the good life. That is an American tragedy. But is it a problem that one court can solve for the whole nation?
Some time soon the notoriously liberal ninth circuit federal appeals court in California will hear arguments in the case of Women v Wal-Mart (official name: Dukes v Wal-Mart Stores). The question before the court is not whether the company has mistreated any of its female workers but whether 1.5m of them can gang up and sue the company for gender discrimination.
Lawyers for the women say this is the worst case of sex bias they have seen in decades. According to them, the company's female employees get paid less than men and promoted less than men - and if they do succeed it is only by dropping their necklines and dolling up.
Is such behaviour legal, even in the 1950s version of America promoted by that patron saint of capitalism, Sam Walton? No - US civil rights law prohibits such bias. What is unclear is whether civil rights law permits the maintenance workers to join forces with the memsahibs in management to bring one giant lawsuit against it.
These days Wal-Mart is taxed with causing many of society's ills, from urban blight to immigrant exploitation. So long as Supercenters were blighting just low-income rural areas - where nobody particularly cared if paradise was paved to put up a Wal-Mart parking lot - there was little blow-back in the press or in the courts.
Now the worm has turned, and everybody loves to hate the world's biggest corporation. As the public interest counsel for the Wal-Mart Women points out, "people are ripe for bringing Wal-Mart down". If they win the argument about whether the women can sue as a group, it will hardly matter whether they can also prove Wal-Mart discriminated against any of them. Faced with potential damages in the billions of dollars, Wal-Mart would be insane to fight in court rather than to settle.
But we are not there yet. The issue before the California appeals court is whether US law permits a small number of aggrieved Wal-Mart workers to sue on behalf of at least 1.5m women who worked for the company since 1998. It all comes down to an argument over the rules for "certifying" a class action lawsuit - the quintessentially American kind of legal action designed to empower the little guy by allowing individuals to sue in groups, when suing alone would be too costly.
Such suits are only permitted where plaintiffs are "similarly situated": common questions of law or fact must pertain. The Wal-Mart Women managed to persuade a federal district judge that there was enough commonality to certify their case as a class action: they argued that the pervasive corporate culture of Wal-Mart promoted sexism throughout the company; and although individual store managers had broad discretion over pay and promotion decisions, Wal-Mart's skinflint culture poisoned them all.
The US Chamber of Commerce says this is a case of a "class action on steroids". In a friend of the court brief (part of the industry's lobbying efforts) that is peppered with italics and outrage, the Chamber argues that the trial judge made grave errors in certifying the case as a class action: he permitted a sociologist to persuade him with "junk science" that Wal-Mart's corporate culture was sexist; he let the plaintiffs present a dubious statistical case, without opportunity for rebuttal; and, worst of all, he let them get away with the apparently contradictory argument that their lawsuit meets the commonality standard both because Wal-Mart culture is rigidly controlled and because that culture gives individual managers discretion to decide each woman's pay packet.
Even the corporate-bashing ninth circuit has never endorsed a class action this broad. And according to John Coffee, class action expert at Columbia Law School, it need not do so now either. "It is not a case of all or nothing," he says.
It might well be unfair to force individual Wal-Mart Women to sue the company on their own because that would give them insufficient leverage over the world's most powerful corporate opponent. But the alternative need not be a nationwide class action that effectively gives plaintiffs blackmail power over their adversary. As in all walks of life, there must be a middle way: a class that is big enough to get Wal-Mart's attention, perhaps based on individual states rather than the whole nation, without merely blackmailing it into submission.
In the end, the courts are not the place to mobilise against stingy employers. Courts are there to enforce justice, not social responsibility.
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