Ms. Weiss said she expected the decision on Monday to change her bargaining position in settlement talks with defendants who had said, “We’re not going to give you more because once the Supreme Court rules, then we’d have to give you zero.”
When a Walmart associate named Jacqueline Cote filed a charge with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2014 contending that the company was discriminating against her by denying health insurance benefits to her same-sex spouse, it signaled the beginning of a drawn-out legal battle.
It was not until December 2016 that the company announced that it had agreed to a settlement retroactively compensating Ms. Cote and other employees affected by the denial of spousal benefits.
If, by contrast, Ms. Cote had brought her case after the Supreme Court ruling on Monday holding that lesbian, gay and transgender employees are covered by the civil rights law that protects workers from discrimination on the basis of race, religion and sex, said one of her lawyers, Janson Wu, executive director of LGBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders, the case would probably have been resolved much more quickly.
“At the time we litigated that case employers could argue that an employee didn’t have a legal claim to bring,” he said. “With this decision, it should be clear that employees shouldn’t even have to bring a lawsuit to enforce their rights.”
