US Edition 
Wal-Mart wins legal victory in 'gender discrimination' case
Wal-Mart scored a major legal victory after the US Supreme Court ruled that a lawsuit alleging gender discrimination by more than 1m female workers cannot go ahead.
Lawyers for the current and former workers had argued that individual cases of alleged discrimination in more than 3,000 of Wal-Mart’s stores in the US should be brought together in a so-called class-action lawsuit.
The loss of such a suit by the world’s biggest retailer could have potentially cost it billions of dollars.
The women were seeking back pay and punitive damages.
The ruling from the court said that the thousands of individual cases “provide no convincing proof” that Wal-Mart had a policy that discriminated against women.
The ruling is the latest chapter in a case that began in 2001 and has divided opinion. Business lobbies have argued strongly that if the suit had been able to proceed as a class-action one it would have led companies across the country to settle potentially merit-less cases just to avoid the possibility of such suits.
Robin Conrad, of the US Chambers of Commerce, America’s biggest business lobby, said that it “was without a doubt the most important class-action case in more than a decade”.
Lawyers for the women said on Monday that the court’s decision “erects substantially higher barriers for women and men to vindicate rights to be free from employment discrimination”.
Wal-Mart, which says it does not discriminate against women, welcomed the decision.