Walmart loses court case over an Americans with Disability Act violation, but doesn't want to pay
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Walmart, the original big-box vendor based in Bentonville, Arkansas, has always looked for ways to promote its wholesome family image. Sure, there are plenty of stories about Walmart killing communities and small businesses. Boy, though, one thing they did do was offer people with disabilities an opportunity to work as a greeter, right? It was a job that put Americans with disabilities out front and made them visible. Well, it was until 2019; that’s when Walmart cut the greeter position at over 1,000 stores, leaving many disabled staff members without a job.
Before all of that, though, Walmart was a champion for those with disabilities, right? Not if you ask the jury that heard the case of Marlo Spaeth. Spaeth has Down syndrome. After working for almost 16 years at her Walmart location with high performance evaluations for her work, Spaeth was switched to a new position. Because she had difficulty adjusting to her new schedule, Walmart fired her in July 2015. Spaeth asked for a 60-minute adjustment to her new schedule to match her prior work schedule, but the company refused. She asked to be rehired in a similar role, and the company refused to consider her application. That was the moment that Spaeth decided to fight back.
Then, after nearly 16 years of working there, Walmart abruptly fired her in 2015. Spaeth, who has Down syndrome, was devastated.
Her sister and legal guardian, Amy Jo Stevenson, said that Spaeth quickly “receded into a shell” and lost the sense of purpose she got from the job at the Walmart Supercenter in Manitowoc, where she had thrived on interacting with customers and had received praise from supervisors in performance reviews.
Devastated. Sixteen years of her life seemed to have been snatched away from her. After hearing a four-day court case brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a jury in Green Bay, Wisconsin, came back quickly with a record judgment of $125 million dollars. The verdict was meant to be a symbol of the level of her pain and suffering, as well as a reflection of the deliberate action that Walmart had taken to seemingly move an employee with a disability around internally in a way that set them up to fail so they could be fired.
In 2020, Walmart reported $129 billion in profit, not counting other businesses where Walmart heirs have ownership stakes. The ownership group is reported to be worth roughly $240 billion, with each family member sitting on around $62 billion. For Walmart, though, Spaeth’s case isn’t over.
While the judge reduced the verdict to $300,000, the maximum allowed in the state, according to Spaeth’s sister, she was still excited about the possibility of going back to work at Walmart.
Walmart makes an interesting claim in its appeal, according to Disability Scoop:
“So while Walmart knew that Ms. Spaeth had requested a return to her prior fixed schedule, nothing in Walmart’s knowledge suggested that this request was linked to her Down syndrome,” reads the court filing, which requests a new trial. “Walmart did not act with malice or reckless indifference towards Ms. Spaeth’s rights.”
There is an interesting thing to note here: Walmart is effectively going to contend that it had no way of knowing that Down syndrome impacts a person’s ability to adjust to a schedule and that after a schedule has been the same for almost 16 years, it is not surprising that changes to that schedule would be exceptionally difficult for that person.
Walmart simply wasn’t aware that Spaeth had Down syndrome, it seems, or they never took it into consideration. Walmart just didn’t see her, or her disability. They knew her for 16 years, but never saw Spaeth for this part of who she was. So they must be blameless, right?
Note: this article originally had an incorrect profit margin pulled which has been corrected.