too big to sue

Walmart is nothing if not a monument to the benefits of mass organization, an exemplar of all the good things that can be extracted by those who assemble themselves into a single large-scale entity. As the largest retailer on earth, the company is generally able to dictate the terms of trade with the thousands of merchants who keep the shelves of its stores stocked with cut-rate goods, tapping factories in China and middlemen traders in Latin America. Walmart has a habit of placing multiple orders with multiple factories for the same products, then forcing each to accept lower prices at the last minute or walk away with nothing. By dint of its scale, it is able to capture the lowest prices for just about everything, from shipping to labor to contracting services. This is the power of being not only huge but organized into one entity. Wal-Mart is the country's largest private employer. Apparently, once a company reaches such stature, its workers cannot claim common ground.

Stripped of technicalities what the Supreme Court essentially decreed this week is that Walmart's employees -- or really any group of people who happen to work for a colossal corporation -- are not entitled to organize themselves similarly to enhance their power to pursue their own interests. The court ruled that female workers may not be considered a class for the purposes of a lawsuit in which they accuse the company of years of gender discrimination, because they worked in many different stores in many different American communities, making their experiences effectively individual. Each Walmart is its own separate unit, for the purposes of the lawsuit. Walmart gets to be a behemoth when it is setting the prices for purchases from factories in Mexico and China, but when its employees want to band together to address alleged abuses in the court system, suddenly the Walmart corporation might just as well be a collection of little mom-and-pop shops that happen to have the same name. The court suggested that the Walmart workers could pursue relief to their claims by filing their own individual lawsuits, but that is no option for low-wage employees who typically earn so little that many rely upon food stamps say labor experts. But low-wage workers employed by large corporations typically lack the resources required to pursue a lawsuit, making the class-action a particularly fruitful avenue. Class-action suits were previously the best tool a worker had to fight discrimination at work. While individual suits are expensive and can be exceedingly difficult to prove, a class-action vehicle allowed workers to band together to fight the corporate powers that be. For the labor movement, this is a distressing development. Another crucial weapon in a diminishing arsenal -- the class action lawsuit -- has been effectively blunted. Big business won, workers lost.

Class actions have been employed by workers--particularly lower-wage workers--as a substitute for the force that collective bargaining wielded in an era of broader union representation. By banding together in large-scale lawsuits, workers have effectively organized themselves into unified, powerful voices, gaining leverage in negotiations with management. The class-action lawsuit was really a substitute for unionism. By blunting that weapon, the Supreme Court has truly left millions of American workers without recourse. In this case, the large voice of female workers was found to be too big to certify as a class, since they were spread out among as many as 3,400 stores and worked for a wide variety of managers. Walmart has never been unionized. But the content of the women's complaints were once the bread and butter of union collective bargaining agreements: equal pay and equal raises for employees. Beginning in 2001, more than 100 female employees accused Walmart -- which pulled in $14.1 billion in profits last year despite lagging U.S. sales -- of paying its female employees less than men in equivalent positions and favoring men in promotions at 3,400 U.S. stores since late 1998.

"We're talking about access to the courts: Very few people other than the super rich can afford the costs of litigation," said John Coffee, a law professor at Columbia University who specializes in class-action suits. "There are other mechanisms to fight discrimination: unions or a tight job market which gives workers leverage. But the employer has all the leverage in today's weak job market, and unions aren't quite the same force they used to be."

"This ruling really ensures the continuation of a kind of slow grinding immiseration of the whole private service sector workforce. And it's it's very difficult to see any remedy." said Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian at the University of California

http://www.citywatchla.com/lead-stories/1832-walmart-decision-supremes-aid-the-powerful