The $188 Million Walmart Rest-Break and Off-the-Clock Verdict
A Philadelphia jury found that Walmart had denied nearly 188,000 Pennsylvania workers paid rest breaks and pay for off-the-clock hours, and the judgment entered on that verdict grew to roughly $188 million.
What happened
Beginning in 1995, Frank Azar's firm built a national campaign against Walmart's wage practices. After concluding that the retailer was forcing hourly staff to work off the clock and altering timecards, Azar filed class actions in 26 states. Walmart's written rules promised paid rest breaks and pay for every hour on the job, yet the firm argued the company routinely broke both promises. The Pennsylvania case became one of the few to reach a jury.
The class covered 187,979 current and former Walmart and Sam's Club employees in Pennsylvania. These were hourly workers across the company's stores who, between March 1998 and April 2006, went unpaid for time worked after their shifts ended and for rest breaks they never fully received.
The case went to trial in the Court of Common Pleas in Philadelphia and ran about six weeks. Rather than calling each of the roughly 188,000 workers to the stand, the plaintiffs proved liability and damages with Walmart's own time and payroll records. Walmart's policy required paid rest breaks of a set length, and its data showed how often those breaks were skipped or cut short. Damages followed a simple formula: the average rate of pay multiplied by the hours that should have been paid but were not.
In October 2006, the jury sided with the workers and awarded about $78.5 million in unpaid wages. The trial court then added statutory liquidated damages, interest, and attorneys' fees, and the judgment entered on the verdict grew to $187,648,589.
Walmart appealed. It argued that proving a class case with company records and a formula, instead of individual hearings for each worker, denied it due process. On December 15, 2014, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court rejected that argument in a 4-1 decision and affirmed the verdict; the only open item was the attorneys' fee award, which an intermediate appeals court had already ordered recalculated under a different standard.
Walmart then asked the U.S. Supreme Court to take the case. On April 4, 2016, the justices denied review and left the Pennsylvania judgment standing. The Pennsylvania verdict and a $172 million result in California stood as the largest jury verdicts to come out of Azar's national Walmart litigation.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.Public Justice: A Victory Against Wage Theft and For Class Actions in Braun v. Walmart(original offline)
- 2.Public Justice: Braun v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. case brief(original offline)
- 3.SCOTUSblog: Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Braun (cert denied April 4, 2016)·Archived copy
- 4.5280 Magazine: Is Frank Azar Colorado's Greatest Lawyer? (cites the $188M PA and $172M CA Walmart verdicts as Azar's)·Archived copy
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