Walmart wins gender discrimination lawsuit

Walmart has been under the microscope for some time now for the way its employees are treated and the Supreme Court threw out a massive class-action lawsuit Monday morning. The suit contended that the American retail giant had systematically discriminated against 1.5 million of its female workers. By a 5-4 vote, the court said the suit wouldn’t go forward as a claim because the plaintiffs couldn’t show that the company had a common policy of discriminating against women. The suit is being marked as the biggest sex discrimination case in history and has been considered too large to bring to trial.

However, Walmart does allow individual store managers to determine pay levels and promotions for its employees. Because the big box corporation won this battle, news experts believe that the case will protect other similarly sized companies from similar claims and lawsuits from its employers regarding race or gender.

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The court system believed the suit may have also been flawed because it wanted individual awards of back pay for the women involved in the claim. Walmart argued that there is no discrimination within its standard business operations.

The suit began almost 10 years ago when employee Betty Dukes and five other co-workers believed they had been passed over for promotions and were paid less than their male counterparts. The case would have cost Walmart billions of dollars and would have set the bar for other gender discrimination cases across the nation.