FOLLOWING a federal judge's certification this week of a class-action lawsuit against Wal-Mart, it appears likely the American public will soon witness the largest ever employment discrimination lawsuit against a corporation. The outcome of the suit, already being hailed as a historic milestone comparable to Brown v. Board of Education, will surely affect our nation's perception of civil rights and the application of laws designed to protect them in the next decade. But unfortunately, the approach taken by the plaintiffs and their supporters already promises to re-enforce the kind of fundamentally flawed thinking that has characterized the civil rights debate of late.
No court has begun to evaluate the merits of the lawsuit itself, Betty Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores. Rather, the suit made headlines because Judge Martin Jenkins certified the creation of a legal "class," in short allowing the suit to confront Wal-Mart on behalf of many women employed by Wal-Mart since 1998 -- a group that could number close to 1.6 million.
The class-action nature of the case stems from the heart of the argument the plaintiffs have set forward. The suit is not a case-by-case condemnation of discriminatory hiring practices; instead, it follows from broad research of Wal-Mart and compiled statistics that suggest major irregularities in the pay and promotion of female employees. News organizations are already broadcasting the shocking figures that will likely become the lawsuit's hallmark: 65 percent of Wal-Mart employees are female while only 33 percent of Wal-Mart managers are female; full-time female employees make 6.2 percent less than full-time male employees; and the list goes on.
The suit suggests that Wal-Mart's management techniques facilitate gender-based discrimination leading to the aforementioned discrepancies by putting the onus of promotion on individual store managers, who are given large freedoms to promote from within based on their personal judgment. The suit also holds that managers are encouraged to maintain a "corporate culture" that excludes women from managerial positions. And while the suit includes "anecdotal evidence of discrimination," the bulk of these accusations appear to be evidenced by recurrent references to the same ominous statistics.
It certainly seems likely that something is rotten in the Walton empire. The facts gathered are a good indicator that women may be treated differently at Wal-Mart, perhaps even illegally. But they offer no evidence. Similarly, theorizing that existing managerial policy could lead to discrimination is very different from showing specific examples of this happening. If Wal-Mart is discriminating against women, the corporation should be sued -- sued for each individual incident and prevented from engaging in such behavior. But instead of taking such a rational approach to protecting civil rights, modern crusaders prefer to attack gross generalizations with sweeping, top-down regulation. Apparently working tirelessly to safeguard the rights of individual Americans is not sufficiently gratifying. Activists want to change the world, and they want to do it now.
The desire to evaluate the Wal-Mart situation in terms of "class" instead of individuals mirrors the skewed logic appropriated by so many who champion civil rights today. Instead of rooting out and confronting specific cases of discrimination in college admissions offices across the country, activists have favored quotas in the past and awarding extra "points" to minority students to counteract perceived bias. And instead of reaching out to the millions of Americans employed by Wal-Mart and assisting them in addressing discrimination, it seems all too likely that those behind Dukes v. Wal-Mart will simply shove discriminatory statistics at company brass and demand that they "do something."
Ironically, attacking discrimination problems with an eye for the big picture rarely results in much real change. Accused of using a system that promotes unfair practices, Wal-Mart will surely spend millions engineering a new promotion system that uses plenty of buzzwords and broadcast their success to the media. Perhaps officials will even mandate that 65 percent of managers must be women within the year. When numbers are at issue, you can bet they receive more attention than real problems.
But if employee after employee sued Wal-Mart, costing the company cash and valuable resources with each case, managers would surely find an efficient way to address the problem. Incidents of real discrimination should not be "anecdotal evidence" -- they should be the case itself.
In America today, sufficient laws are in place to protect the rights of our citizens. The nation is not in need of more federal involvement, more regulation and more asinine mandates shaped by superficial analysis and generalization. Instead, we need activists willing to climb off their high horse and descend into the trenches to fight whatever discrimination exists on a case-by-case, individual basis. Civil rights pioneers died to win equal protection under the law. Now we must strive not for statistical equality for imagined "classes," but to ensure that Americans are assured their rights individually.
Nick Chapin is a Cavalier Daily columnist. He can be reached at nchapin@cavalierdaily.com.
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