Judge rejects women’s class-action lawsuit against Wal-Mart

After the Supreme Court threw out a class-action lawsuit claiming women across 34,000 Wal-Mart stores had been discriminated against, some of the women began reforming into smaller groups with different strategies. But the latest suit, in San Francisco, was rejected by a California judge.

Initially, women sought to prove that nationally, Wal-Mart gave them less raises and promotions than men. When that failed, the last AP writes, California women chose specific incidents, statements, and decisions instead of broader statistical patterns. The judge, Charles Breyer, said that “Though plaintiffs insist that they have presented an entirely different case from the one the Supreme Court rejected, it is essentially a scaled-down version of the same case with new labels on old arguments” and therefore invalid. But according to Reuters, he did allow some room for legal action, because “This order does not consider whether plaintiffs themselves were victims of discrimination as alleged in their complaint; those individual claims shall proceed in this litigation."

Wal-Mart is infamous for its poor treatment of employees. Just last month a Wal-Mart worker in Canada claimed she was fired for trying to help a dog left in a hot car. And then, of course, there’s the Gawker article of horror stories from employees. Some of the stories were the employees’ response to a Wal-Mart plea for them to talk about the true Wal-Mart.