By Lyle Denniston | SCOTUSblog
The twelve-year effort by women employees of the giant Wal-Mart Stores discount chain to prove that they are victims of workplace bias has hit another legal obstacle, as a federal judge in San Franicsco turned aside their newly crafted plan to join together in common claims of sex discrimination in pay and promotions. They had pared down their group claim from a class of 1.5 million workers — a class rejected by the Supreme Court two years ago — to one-tenth that number, 150,000.
But, Senior U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer, in a seventeen-page ruling issued Friday, said the new class was still too large and that the claims were still too lacking in specifics to show that the women in the group suffered the same kind of bias from managers or company leaders He thus refused to allow them to continue their case as a class-action lawsuit under federal civil rights law. The ruling left the female workers, present and former, to try to prove their own claims individually. The judge did not rule on any of those.
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