Dive Brief:
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Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court largely affirmed the ruling in a class action suit first brought ten years ago against Wal-Mart Stores Inc. claiming that the company had failed to pay members for hours worked and prevented them from taking breaks to which they were entitled.
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The ruling in the lower and appellate courts was a $151 million judgment in unpaid wages and damages, plus attorney fees, for the plaintiffs in a lawsuit initiated in 2002. The case involves some 187,000 employees of Walmart and Sam’s Club stores who worked between March 1998 and April 2006.
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Wal-Mart said it maintains that the case should never have been granted class action status and therefore should never have been brought. The retailer said it may appeal further to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Dive Insight:
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is fighting the very idea of this lawsuit, in the sense that it argues that it should never have risen to class-action status. The retailer also argues that every worker affected should have been made to testify in the case. That isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds; the U.S. Supreme Court ruled years ago that in another suit against Wal-Mart, class action claims shouldn’t have been made because the testimony of a few workers were improperly extrapolated to the wider class.
But the courts so far have rejected that notion, saying that the timetables at the stores in question and many of Wal-Mart’s own records helped back up the testimony of some members of the class — enough, anyway to satisfy the plaintiffs’ claims that a pattern was established.