Women Launch New Legal Salvo Against Wal-Mart

Women pursuing discrimination claims against Arkansas-based Wal-Mart Stores Inc. filed a reformulated lawsuit against the retailer, their first since a massive nationwide class action collapsed earlier this year. The amended lawsuit confines its allegations to women workers in California, saying Wal-Mart systematically treats them unfairly.

Plaintiffs alleging the company denied them pay raises and promotions because of gender bias are regrouping after the U.S. Supreme Court dismantled a class of up to 1.5 million current and former Wal-Mart workers in June.

The California lawsuit is the first in a series of complaints that will be filed in different regions in the next three to six months, plaintiff attorneys said.

“We are beginning with the locales where the evidence of discrimination is strongest,” Joseph Sellers, co-lead counsel for the plaintiffs, said at a news briefing.

Sellers declined to say when or where the new cases will be filed.

Wal-Mart spokesman Greg Rossiter said Wal-Mart is a great place for women to work.

“Walmart is not the company the plaintiffs’ lawyers say it is,” Rossiter said. “Not then. Not now.”

The U.S. Supreme Court agreed with Wal-Mart’s argument female employees in different jobs, with different supervisors, at 3,400 stores nationwide do not have enough in common to be lumped together in a single class-action lawsuit. Plaintiff attorneys then said they would respond with more narrowly tailored lawsuits.

The case in U.S. District Court, Northern District of California is Betty Dukes, Patricia Surgeson, Edith Arana, Deborah Gunter and Christine Kwapnoski, on behalf of themselves and all others similarly situated v. Wal-Mart Stores Inc., 01-2252.

Reporting by Dan Levine and Poornima Gupta; editing by Maureen Bavdek and Andre Grenon.