Walmart has lost its appeal of a 224 million dollar lawsuit for forcing its 187,000 Pennsylvania employees to work through their lunch breaks. The Supreme Court rejected its appeal, and Walmart will be paying its workers 140 million dollars plus ten years of interest.
“Wage theft will not be tolerated, and class actions are an optimal way for large numbers of workers to recover wages stolen by their employers,” said Michael D. Donovan, the employees’ attorney, from Donovan Litigation Group in Berwyn.
Making Change At Walmart, a national labor union, had this
to say about the verdict:
“The world’s largest retailer won’t be able to continue to mistreat its workers and get away with it. Walmart workers, when they come together, have a powerful voice that cannot be silenced.”
The case was first brought by Michelle Braun in 2002, who worked at the Franklin Mills Walmart store. She was joined by her colleagues and together they filed a wage-and-hour lawsuit against Walmart.
Braun would testify that she was clocked out, but was then locked inside and forced to continue working without pay after the end of her shift.
In 2006, the Philadelphia jury found that the workers were owed 140 million dollars in unpaid wages.Walmart appealed the decision, dragging it out for eight years. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court affirmed the jury verdict in 2014, but Walmart appealed again. This year the US Supreme Court ended the debacle by refusing to hear the case, standing by the Pennsylvania high court’s decision.
Walmart has done obscenely well, first by buying cheap foreign products made under appalling conditions, and using this cost advantage to drive local businesses out, second by paying its workers extremely low wages (often forcing them to subsist on over 6.2 billion dollars worth of tax-payer-funded food stamps), and third by avoiding having to pay most of its taxes by shifting its profits to off-shore tax havens… making the Walton Family THE richest family in the world, worth 149 billion dollars.
Basically, the ticket to riches is to first enslave foreigners for their labor, then enslave locals for their labor, and then finally enslave all tax payers to fund your empire. Rinse and repeat until total world domination is achieved.
Unfortunately, enslaved people can’t even afford to buy cheap cr**. As such, Walmart has recently marked its first ever revenue reduction and has had to close 154 stores in the US– analogies involving dying golden geese and snakes swallowing their tails abound.
Sources: Occupy Democrats, Philly.com, Forbes, Bloomberg
This article (Walmart Steals Lunch Breaks from 187,000 Workers, Forced to Pay $224 Million) is a free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author(CoNN) and AnonHQ.com.
They should have been shut down for good. Not a single store is run ethically. From stories like this to discussing work with employees off the clock to straight up racism, sexism and more. What normal company would hold a surgery against you when the alternative is life threatening. I’ve seen and heard horror stories and it’s sickening.
This is what you sheeple have brought upon your country. If you’ve had enough why don’t you take up arms and march on Washington and physically kick out the establishment?
Quit supporting Walmart!!!! Buy local!!!
I will absolutely never shop at Walmart. All the junk in the store comes from China or some poor third world country where they make 23 cents an hour!
A Majority of the products that are sold in us stores comes from China . It’s not only Walmart that sells products China , check your other stores before u judge one .
If Americans today had to live with only products manufactured in the U.S., there would be riots.
Sam Walton would be ashamed and appalled at what is happened with his company
I started working for them as a means for extra income when I retired and I have witnessed first hand the wrong doing in their labor practices, such as their part time workers that work 40 a week consistently but are paid as part time, they recently stopped holiday pay so now employees are required to work without pay on holidays, they demand workers to work past their 8 hours, but in an effort not to pay overtime, they make them adjust it, I.e. come in later or take longer lunch hours. This may however just be management. You have to keep up with and check your time worked. I work full time so 80 hours every two weeks, but only got paid for 72 once. I talked with Personnel, but it was never corrected. Overtime isn’t paid at time and a half. There is so much wrong doing. But, many are afraid of losing their jobs and won’t speak up. But this its also why they don’t want unions.
If i would have been locked in a store and forced to work off the clock, i would have called 911 and said i was kidnapped and forced to work without pay…..
Or…
I would have just trashed the place.
Lit bon fires ect…then. uzt2d out througj their glass windows.
Kidnapping is a felony in all states