Supreme Court rules for Wal-Mart in sex discrimination suit

Jun 20, 2011, 15:43 GMT

Washington - The US Supreme Court ruled Monday that a group of female employees cannot sue Wal-Mart collectively for alleged sex discrimination.

The Wal-Mart employees asserted the world's largest retailer routinely favoured male counterparts for promotion and better wages.

The question before the court was not whether there was in fact discrimination, but whether the large group could collectively sue Wal-Mart for damages in a class-action lawsuit, or whether they must sue individually.

The unanimous decision by the court's nine justices reverses an earlier decision by a US appeals court in San Francisco. The justices found no unified corporate policy to unite the claims into one suit.

A victory for the female workers could have led to more than 1 million women joining the lawsuit, and might have prompted similar class-action lawsuits by other groups of women and minorities who believe they have been discriminated against by their employers.

'We are pleased with today's ruling and believe the court made the right decision,' Wal-Mart Executive Vice President Gisel Ruiz said in a statement.

'The court today unanimously rejected class certification and, as the majority made clear, the plaintiffs' claims were worlds away from showing a companywide discriminatory pay and promotion policy,' she said, pointing to the world's largest retail chain's anti-discrimination policies.

WalMart has in the past acknowledged individual cases of discrimination, but insists there is no pattern across the company. They argue the women's complaints are too different to be combined in one lawsuit that could be worth billions of dollars in damages.

The women who brought the case can proceed with individual lawsuits against the company.

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