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Minnesota workers won big against Wal-Mart; Wisconsin workers already lost their case
Thousands of Wal-Mart employees in Minnesota stand to collect millions in back pay thanks to a court ruling this week, but employees of the world's largest retailer in Wisconsin have already lost a similar case.
Dakota County (Minn.) Judge Robert R. King Jr. ruled Monday that Wal-Mart owes $6.5 million to current and former employees for failing to give workers rest breaks and for making employees take in-house training while off the clock.
While the lawsuit will now move to a jury trial on Oct. 20 to determine punitive damages and possible fines for the company, a similar claim against Wal-Mart in Wisconsin two years ago resulted in a much different decision.
In 2001, three Milwaukee Wal-Mart employees filed suit against the company alleging similar grievances of missed meal and rest breaks. The case was eventually dismissed in 2006, when the District 1 Court of Appeals ruled a class action lawsuit to be "unmanageable." Attorney Robert F. Johnson, who represented the Milwaukee employees, said he doesn't quite understand why his clients' case was thrown out when the facts are comparable to the Minnesota case.
"With respect to the Minnesota case and the Wisconsin case, I personally didn't feel there was much of a difference at all," Johnson told The Capital Times Thursday.
There are currently around 70 cases across the country involving similar grievances. A few have gone in favor of Wal-Mart employees, including a December 2005 decision by a California jury, which awarded $172 million to employees. In Pennsylvania, a jury awarded $78 for the same claims.
Wal-Mart is still appealing both of those rulings and evaluating appeal options in the Minnesota case. Company spokeswoman Daphne Moore told the Minneapolis Star Tribune this week that "we're pleased the court ruled in our favor on many points, (but) we do respectfully disagree with portions of the decision."
The majority of class action lawsuits filed against Wal-Mart have been dismissed, as was the case in Wisconsin.
The Minnesota case was certified as a class action and the court denied Wal-Mart's motion that the claims should be treated individually. While the court acknowledged that there is no perfect way to represent the class, it found enough general trends between a number of plaintiffs to represent the class.
But the Wisconsin appellate decision said Wal-Mart would be allowed to challenge the credibility and accuracy of the evidence, which would lead to the examination of "each and every member of the proposed class," The decision stated that "to say that such a trial would be unmanageable is somewhat akin to saying that the sun is warm or that the universe is large."
UW-Madison Law Professor Carin Clauss noted that the Minnesota plaintiffs claims that Wal-Mart managers routinely made employees work off-the-clock were dismissed. She says if those claims played a significant role in the Wisconsin case, they may have been inappropriate for a class-action suit.
"Most of the claims were off-the-clock work, and those claims are just so hard to establish," Clauss said. "It's harder to establish that you have a standard operating procedure of violating federal law than that you have a standard operating procedure of disregarding guarantees of rest breaks."
The Wisconsin court said the plaintiffs' complaints were more appropriate for individual claims against Wal-Mart. But Johnson says those claims would be "economically prohibitive."
"The individual claims are such that the cost involved in pursuing them would equal or exceed the benefit you would get," Johnson said. "I'm sure that Wal-Mart would have fought every one of these cases, making it impossible for the plaintiffs to fight these cases economically."
While he insists the cases dealt with the same basic issue, Johnson says the difference in decisions may have just depended on the discretion of the court.
"In cases like these, you're going to be subject to the whim of the court," Johnson said.
File photo
Wal-Mart lost a court ruling in Minnesota this week, but a similar case in Wisconsin was won by the retailer two years ago.
