Check out this interview with the infamous Liza Featherstone:
STAY FREE!: I was amazed that some of these women--who had been through hell with Wal-Mart and had incredibly solid cases--would opt for a class-action suit, because they'd get a lot more money out of a private lawsuit. Also, they wouldn't have to worry about the case dragging on for years.FEATHERSTONE: Yes, actually, in their cases, they have the resources to pursue individual suits, but they really want to change Wal-Mart. If they were to sue as individuals, Wal-Mart would settle and it would never have to make any institutional reforms. The only reason these women are doing the class action--aside from the strength in numbers--is because they want to change the company.
STAY FREE!: But if a bunch of women sued Wal-Mart individually, wouldn't Wal-Mart see that they're losing money and see that discrimination is ultimately against their interest?
FEATHERSTONE: No, there would be so few cases that it wouldn't matter. A million dollars every few years is nothing to Wal-Mart.
STAY FREE!: How successful are class-action suits in changing companies? If the workers win, what then?
FEATHERSTONE: With a class-action suit, you can order a company to pay back wages to the people it wronged. You can order it to change its promotion system, to provide better incentives for promoting minorities, to post its jobs, and you can have some degree of enforcement. That's the ideal scenario. Those reforms are so much better than nothing, but they're ultimately kind of limited because they don't really change the balance of power between the worker and the employer very much. What you can accomplish with a class-action suit is nothing next to what you can accomplish if the workers organize. [Emphasis added]
Although Ms. Featherstone meant to imply that the economic damage of losing individual discrimination suits would not be devastating to Wal-Mart -- especially compared to the impact of a class action loss or unionization -- her assumptions undermine the morality and justifiability of the class action.
It is Ms. Featherstone's explicit estimation that the women (like Betty Dukes) who have plausible discrimation complaints agains Wal-Mart have the resources to sue individually. However, they chose to sue as a class because Wal-Mart has not discriminated against enough women to make a difference in the way the company operates if all the alleged victims actually won their cases.
This admission is startling, for several reasons. The most important being that it shows that the plaintiffs (and their legal team) probably have no good reason to believe that most of the women in the class were actual victims of discrimination by Wal-Mart. The plaintiffs have chosen to use over a million women as pawns in their lawsuit-cum-social-engineering experiment. They're nothing but a pile of bargaining chips...
Posted by Kevin on March, 30 2005 at 12:18 PM
