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last updated 8 January 2015

Wal-Mart: Supreme Court sides with employers

The Supreme Court handed Big Business a huge victory by throwing out a class-action lawsuit against Wal-Mart this week, said Adam Liptak in The New York Times. The court overturned a U.S. appeals court ruling that said some 1.5 million female employees and former employees could join a suit charging that the retailer had discriminated against them in pay and promotion decisions. The high court’s decision that the women could not proceed as a group “will almost certainly affect all sorts of other class-action suits, including ones asserting antitrust, securities, and product-liability violations.”

It was the court’s “most important job-discrimination dispute in more than a decade,” said James Vicini in Reuters.com. The high court accepted Wal-Mart’s argument that female employees in various jobs at 3,400 stores nationwide do not have enough in common to be lumped together in a single lawsuit. The Supreme Court examined only whether the women could go to trial as a group, not whether their claims had any merit. Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer and the largest private employer in the U.S., has denied that it discriminates. First filed in June 2001, the suit sought billions of dollars in back pay.

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The Web is moving way beyond dot-com, said Pavel Alpeyev and Ketaki Gokhale in Bloomberg Businessweek. This week, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers approved website addresses ending with almost any word in any language. The decision is a big opportunity for corporations that want more control over their online presence, “and a danger for those who fail to take advantage,” said Reuters.com. The price for registering a new domain name is $185,000, but generic names will be auctioned to the highest bidder. The new names won’t go live until the end of 2012.

The foreclosure system is so bogged down that it could take decades for banks to clear the pipeline of repossessed homes, said David Streitfeld in The New York Times. In the state of New York, where a judge has to rule on foreclosures, clearing the backlog will take lenders an estimated 62 years at the current pace; in New Jersey, it will take 49 years. The process is faster in the 27 states where the courts are not involved in foreclosures, but even there, “many lenders seem to be in no hurry to add repossessed houses to their books.”

Unemployment rates will stay above 10 percent through 2012 in 69 U.S. cities, said Jennifer Liberto in CNNMoney.com. California tops the hardest-hit list, with six metropolitan areas, according to a report released this week by IHS Global Insights, while Florida has five struggling cities. The report projects that pre-recession employment levels won’t return until the end of the decade to Rust Belt areas like Detroit and the Ohio cities of Cleveland, Dayton, Toledo, and Youngstown.

Anarchist hackers of the world are uniting, said FoxNews.com. The group LulzSec, “which in recent weeks has defaced and disabled sites from Sony to the CIA,” pledged to join forces with Anonymous, another hacker organization, in an attack on government and corporate websites worldwide. “Welcome to Operation Anti-Security,” the group said in a statement distributed over Twitter. LulzSec says it doesn’t hack for profit, but just to “have fun by causing mayhem.” The new hacker campaign comes as the U.S. government mulls increasing maximum jail time for cyberterrorists to 20 years.

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