Back in February,
I wrote about Patrick Murphy won $7.5 million dollars from Wal-Mart. Murphy has cerebral palsy and he alleged that the company moved him from the pharmacy to garbage duty in order to get rid of him.
Thanks to Kevin at Always Low Prices I see that the verdict has been reduced to $2.8 million. However, running through some his links I came across a report on the verdict and it's actually incredibly damining to Wal-Mart.
This is a summation of Judge James Orenstein's opinion on Wal-Mart as
quoted in the New York Law Journal:
He found that in dealing with Brady, the company had not adhered to a consent decree it entered into with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2001 requiring it to train managers and change hiring practices.
"The most generous conclusion I could draw ... was that the Wal-Mart employees who testified are well-intentioned people whom the company willfully failed to provide with sufficient training to abide by the anti-discrimination law," Orenstein wrote.
"The result," he concluded, "was that Brady was subjected to the kind of discrimination against the disabled that both the law and the prior consent decree was designed to prevent."
He reduced the verdict because the punitive damage award had no chance of preventing Wal-Mart from breaking the law in the future:
Under federal anti-discrimination law, punitive damages are calculated according to the size of the employer.
"The statute calibrates its caps on punitive damages to reflect the size of the employer whose misconduct is to be punished -- a scheme that would appear designed to assure that the civil punishment imposed on a corporate offender is meaningful but not fatal," the magistrate judge held.
Violators with 15 to 100 employees would pay no more than $50,000, for instance. Those with 500 or more employees, like Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, would pay up to $300,000.
"There is no meaningful sense in which such an award can be considered punishment," Orenstein wrote, pointing out that Wal-Mart had $300,000 in sales every 37 seconds last year.
"In essence then," he continued, "most companies can be punished if they intentionally discriminate on the basis of disability ... but the biggest companies that do so are effectively beyond the law's reach."
Orenstein concludes:
"The preceding ruling respects the law...but it does not achieve a just result."
Happy 4th of July everybody! Wal-Mart has the freedom to treat its employees however it likes without serious punishment. At least Patrick Brady was still free to sue. How long will that last?
JR