Supreme Court Takes A Pass On Walmart’s Class-Action Appeal

The last calendar year has not be kind to Walmart. Amid sliding stock prices, the retail conglomerate has also been fighting an expensive legal battle over wages employees in Pennsylvania have maintained for years they are rightfully due.

On Monday (April 4), Walmart received at least some measure of expensive closure on the latter front.

Reuters reported that the U.S. Supreme Court has unanimously voted to throw out an appeal from Walmart that sought to overturn a decision awarding $187 million to the retailer’s employees in Pennsylvania. The decision, which was originally handed down in 2007 by a minor court and upheld in 2014 by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, ordered Walmart to pay restitution for failing to compensate employees fully for time worked and preventing them from taking adequate meal and rest periods. The decision includes roughly 187,000 Walmart employees who worked in Pennsylvania stores between 1998 and 2006.

“We are disappointed the Supreme Court decided not to review our case,” a Walmart spokesman told Reuters. “While we continue to believe these claims should not be bundled together in a class-action lawsuit, we respect the court’s decision.”

As Walmart’s lawyers strike out at the highest court in the land, they’re also having trouble in less prominent courtrooms, like those run by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The Dallas Morning News reported that Walmart filed another appeal in early March in protest of an NLRB judge’s decision that the firing of 16 Texas employees in 2013 was unlawful retaliation for those workers’ participation in labor strikes.

The NLRB has until April 21 to review Walmart‘s appeal in this case and issue a secondary ruling, but if its recent history with legal rulings is any indication, the plaintiffs in the Texas case have some very fresh evidence to point to in their courtroom drama with one of the country’s largest and most powerful retailers.