Wal-Mart Pays Environmental Fine and Faces Sexual Discrimination Charges

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. will pay a $1 million fine to resolve charges that it violated environmental laws while building stores in four states.

Wal-Mart, which builds more than 300 stores a year, also agreed to better monitor future construction. The Environmental Protection Agency said that could cost another $4.5 million.

“Those responsible for construction sites must control hazardous pollutants from flowing into drinking water sources and waterways,” EPA Administrator Christie Whitman said in a statement.

The EPA had accused Wal-Mart of violating the Clean Water Act and illegally discharging dirt from 17 construction sites in Massachusetts, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas.

Wal-Mart spokesman Bill Wertz said the fine would be paid jointly by the company and contractors. He said the charges involved “paperwork violations,” not actual damage to the environment.

“No waterways or animal species were impacted,” Wertz said.

Water quality regulators monitor construction project runoff, which can carry pollutants into storm drains and sewer systems and eventually into streams.

The fine, part of a settlement filed June 7 in federal court in Fayetteville, was the first enforcement of storm water regulations for violations in multiple states, the Justice Department said.

“With this settlement, we are taking an important step to protect streams and lakes near construction sites,” said John Cruden, acting assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s environment division.

Wertz said the allegations involve just 17 of the hundreds of stores built from 1995-98. Wal-Mart will now require contractors to certify they have drainage plans before starting construction. The company also will sample pollutants in storm water at some construction sites, reporting findings to the EPA.

n Six female employees of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. filed a class action lawsuit June 19 charging the nation’s largest private employer with regularly discriminating against hundreds of thousands of female workers in Wal-Mart and Sam’s Clubs stores nationwide.

“It’s as if the last 25 years of progress for women never happened at Wal-Mart,” said Brad Seligman of The Impact Fund, a Berkeley, Calif.-based civil rights organization that helped create what is believed to be the largest sex discrimination case ever filed against a private U.S. employer.

“There is a company policy and practice across the country of sex discrimination,” Seligman said, adding that as many as 700,000 current and former Wal-Mart employees could eventually be a part of the case.

The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, charges Wal-Mart with discriminating against female employees in pay, promotion and training, and with retaliating against women employees who complain about the alleged abuse.

The suit demands a court order directing Wal-Mart to stop its allegedly discriminatory practices as well as compensation for lost wages for hundreds of thousands of women affected — potentially making it one of the largest sex discrimination suits ever filed.

Lucky Stores, a California-based grocer, paid $107 million in 1995 to settle a sex discrimination case that covered just 14,000 employees while Texaco paid $176 million to settle a racial discrimination complaint that applied to a class of just 1,400 former employees.

“This case is 10, 20 times as large in terms of the numbers of class members … this is off the charts,” Seligman said.

The plaintiffs say that although women comprise over 72 percent of the U.S. Wal-Mart workforce of 962,000, men account for 90 percent of Wal-Mart store manager positions. The company’s global workforce numbers more than 1.24 million.

Overall, less than one-third of store management at Wal-Mart is female — a percentage far lower than the number of female managers employed by Wal-Mart’s major competitors, the suit charges.

The suit also charges that Wal-Mart creates a “sexually demeaning atmosphere” for women employees, who are told that “women do not make good managers” and “a trained monkey” could do their jobs, a news release said.