3 Sue Wal-Mart, Say It Underpaid Them

Three Wal-Mart Stores Inc. hourly workers in California have sued the company, alleging that the retailer failed to pay them for all the time they worked.

The lawsuit, filed Friday in Alameda County Superior Court, seeks damages, penalties and restitution for Wal-Mart hourly employees in California after Jan. 1, 1997. The plaintiffs have asked the court for class-action status. They estimate that there are more than 200,000 potential class members.

The suit alleges that Wal-Mart “deleted thousands of hours of time worked from employees’ payroll records” by erasing overtime hours and by penalizing employees who forgot to punch in after their meal breaks by denying them pay for the remainder of those days.

A Wal-Mart spokeswoman said the company had not yet seen the suit. It is the latest in a string of legal actions against the world’s largest retailer.

The suit says the plaintiffs, Jerrilyn Newland, Charlotte Johnson and James Davis, became aware of such practices, known as time shaving, after reading a newspaper article in April that said companies including Wal-Mart had engaged in such practices.

In that report, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman said company policy was to pay hourly workers for all their time, but that there were “inevitably instances of managers doing the wrong thing.”

Issues related to Wal-Mart’s compliance with labor regulations have dogged the Bentonville, Ark.-based company.

Last year, three assistant managers sued the company in Los Angeles for forcing them to work overtime without pay and denying them breaks. Also, a Washington state court last year gave the go-ahead to a class-action suit accusing Wal-Mart of violating the state’s wage and hour laws.

In June, Wal-Mart became the target of the biggest civil rights class-action case in U.S. history when a federal judge in San Francisco said a lawsuit charging that it discriminated against women could proceed as a class action, ruling that as many as 1.5 million women could join the suit. Wal-Mart is appealing the ruling.

Wal-Mart, whose reputation has been tarnished by the dozens of discrimination cases it is fighting, launched a national advertising campaign last week aimed at repairing its image.

Wal-Mart employs more than 1.2 million people in the U.S. and operates about 3,660 stores nationwide.