Jury fines Wal-Mart $172 million
OAKLAND, Calif. – A California jury on Thursday awarded $172 million to thousands of employees at Wal-Mart Stores Inc. who claimed they were illegally denied lunch breaks.
The world’s largest retailer was ordered to pay $57 million in general damages and $115 million in punitive damages to about 116,000 current and former California employees for violating a 2001 state law that requires employers to give 30-minute, unpaid lunch breaks to employees who work at least six hours.
The damages were originally tallied as $207 million after a court clerk misread the punitive damages as $150 million. The amount of punitive damages was later clarified.
The class-action lawsuit in Alameda County Superior Court is one of about 40 nationwide alleging workplace violations by Wal-Mart, and the first to go to trial. The Bentonville, Ark.-based retailer, which earned $10 billion last year, settled a similar lawsuit in Colorado for $50 million.
In the California suit, Wal-Mart had claimed that workers did not demand penalty wages on a timely basis. Under the law, the company must pay workers a full hour’s wages for every missed lunch.
The company also said it paid some employees their penalty pay and, in 2003, most workers agreed to waive their meal periods as the law allows.
The lawsuit covers former and current employees in California from 2001 to 2005. The workers claimed they were owed more than $66 million plus interest, and sought damages to punish the company for alleged wrongdoing.
The lawsuit was filed by several former Wal-Mart employees in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2001. It took four years of legal wrangling to get to trial.
The verdict comes as the company is waging an intense public-relations campaign to counter critics aiming to stop the retailer’s expansion and make it boost workers’ salaries and benefits. The company added lower-cost health insurance this year after an internal memo surfaced that showed 46 percent of Wal-Mart employees’ children were on Medicaid or uninsured.