According to news reports, an important case is coming up before the Supreme Court of the United States.
Walmart Stores, the world’s largest retailer, went before the Supreme Court on Tuesday to argue that the court should halt a class action anti-discrimination lawsuit brought by female employees that could cost the retailer billions. In the works for the last 10 years, the suit could be the largest class action civil rights case in U.S. history.
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. Walmart has denied any wrongdoing and emphasizes that its corporate policy forbids discrimination, encourages diversity and ensures fair treatment.
A Walmart win would be a terrible blow to civil rights, legal experts say, compromising the mechanism that allows employees to unveil and protect themselves against workplace discrimination.
“Some employers have made the economic calculus that they’ll never be held accountable for discrimination, if it exists, and they might as well continue the status quo until someone holds them accountable for it,” said Marcia Greenberger, co-president of the National Women’s Law Center. “I think a victory [against] Walmart would change that.”
What’s At Stake In The Massive Walmart Anti-Discrimination Case Before The Supreme Court
Why waste any print or time on this?
SCOTUS will rule against the workers. It will rule for the corporations.
The oligarchic, plutocratic, kleptocratic takeover of American government at all levels, Congress, Judiciary, and Executive, is pretty much complete at this point. The Citizens United ruling by SCOTUS demonstrated this pretty clearly, when it declared the corporations had the same rights as natural born human beings and citizens, and destroyed the constraints that Congress had put in place to try to control the flooding and corruption of American elections by corporate money. As a result, an already corrupt system is now falling apart completely, as corporations poured massive amounts of money into politics in 2010 to insure the success of their astroturf candidates and fake interest groups and their influence on American voters. These same forces are already gearing up for an even greater financial assault on American Democracy in 2012.
To expect any ruling now that upholds the rule of law or the rights of workers is just a waste of time. Bow down now to your masters, the 25% of our citizens who own over 87% of the wealth of the nation, or more. And your corporate masters, who own Congress, pay no taxes (See GE, billions in unpaid taxes). And your masters the bankers, the minions of Wall Street, the hedge fund managers, and the corrupt masters of the manipulated stock markets, are all awash in taxpayer bailout money, insuring bonuses and the ability to lobby Congress with taxpayer dollars, while the deficit is to be addressed by destroying the middle class, the unions, and the poor and the sick, and insuring that their votes are prevented or ignored.
Welcome to what USED TO BE America. Not sure what to call it anymore. Certainly not the land of the free under a rule of law. More like a sharecroppers’ nightmare, with a Middle Class threatened with extinction, and honest elections uncorrupted by the corrosive power of massive amounts of money from corporations and the wealthy, like the Koch brothers and their attempt to buy Wisconsin and fund the destruction of unions there, a thing of the past. When you have Republicans now actively advocating a return to child labor, just what do you expect?