The Supreme Court of the United States ruled today that female employees who charged that Wal-Mart discriminated against them because of their gender will not be able to file a class action suit.
As many as 1.6 million women could have been part of what may have been the country's largest sex discrimination case. Billions of dollars were at stake. The high court has ruled that the plaintiffs must pursue their appeals individually.
This reverses the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruling made last year.
The SCOTUS ruling was unanimous that there can be no class-action claim, however, it was divided that future suit by workers can be blocked.
Writing for the majority, Justice Scalia said that for a case to qualify as class action, there needs to be commonalities linking "literally millions of employment decisions at once." In this Wal-Mart case, that connection, Scalia wrote "is entirely absent."
Wal-Mart's written policies bar gender bias.
The dissenting opinion was written by Justice Ginsburg who said that the cases of all of the company's female employees were linked. "Wal-Mart's delegation of discretion over pay and promotions is a policy uniform throughout all stores," she said.
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