Retail giant Wal-Mart has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to halt what could be the mother of all employment gender bias class action lawsuits.

Yesterday the retailer petitioned the Court to reverse a 9^th Circuit ruling that would allow more than 1.5 million women employees to join a lawsuit alleging the company paid women less than men and passed women over for promotions, reports the Christian Science Monitor. The closely split, 6-5 ruling allows women who worked in any Wal-Mart store since 1998 to join the suit.

The dissenting judges in the case noted that the women may not share the same circumstances, and they may not have suffered a common injury. One dissenter, Judge Alex Kosinski, wrote: “They have little in common but their sex and this lawsuit.”

Wal-Mart claims that a class action so large would be almost impossible to defend.

“The class is larger than the active-duty personnel in the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guard combined - making it the largest employment class action in history by several orders of magnitude,” wrote Theodore Boutrous in the brief filed with the Supreme Court.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 26th, 2010 at 7:13 am and is filed under Federal Courts, Supreme Court. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.