30.09.2019
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Tallahassee, FL – The Florida Supreme Court is deciding whether Walmart widowers can sue the corporation for a share of the life insurance policies Walmart purchased in their wives' names. They want some of the $9.6 million the corporation collected when the insurance benefits were paid. Walmart got the money when 132 Florida employees enrolled in a corporate-owned life insurance program died. When a company names itself a beneficiary on a policy bought in the name of a rank and file employee, it is known as Dead Peasants Insurance. Walmart stopped the practice in 2000, saying it was losing money. In the case before the Florida Supreme Court, a federal judge is asking the court to decide at the time the policies were purchased whether Florida law provided family members standing - the right to sue to claim the life insurance money.

Apr 17, 2014 - Moreover, since Walmart put its workers' handbooks online. Shifts are available, Murray said, because Walmart doesn't fully staff its stores.

  1. WAL-MART STORES, INC., POLICY REGARDING SERVICE ANIMALS. FOR PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., is committed to making reasonable modifications to its policies, practices, and procedures to permit the use of service animals by its customers with disabilities.
  2. The Global Labor and Employment Policy contains some information, as does Working at Walmart. Companies are not required to make their private internal information available to the public, so specific information is only available internally to current employees, as seems to be the case with Walmart's employee handbook.

Eileen Moss represents Walmart. It has paid more than $15 million to settle class action dead peasant suits in Texas and Oklahoma, but in Florida, she argued the law is on Walmart's side. 'You have to have standing.

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They were not parties to the contract, and they weren't harmed by it. They didn't pay the premiums, and so the decision was made no standing.

Now, where they started creating standing was through statutory rights.' Moss argued the Florida Legislature in 2008 gave families the right to sue, standing.

New rights cannot be applied retroactively. The estates of Rita Atkinson and Karen Armatrout see it differently. They argued that two years ago lawmakers clarified Florida law, and the rights were already there. Michael Myers represents Atkinson, Armatrout, and others.

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He points to the case of a Port St. Lucie banker. Seventy-three years ago his estate argued all the way to the Supreme Court that it had a legal claim on the life insurance money. 'I think the importance of that case is a bank president's family had the right to sue. So if a bank executive's family had the right to sue in 1937, why wouldn't the families of pharmacy workers and administrative people in the office have the right to sue in 2010?' That case is McMullen, and Moss argued Myers is misreading it. She said McMullen did not decide standing.

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Therefore, prior to 2008 the only remedy available would be to declare the policies void. Her remarks drew these comments from Justice Barbara Pariente. 'I would have agreed with you that I thought the only remedy was to be able to void a policy. But I don't think McMullen can be dispensed with as simply in terms of that this court was saying, certainly didn't say they didn't have standing and certainly didn't say that they wouldn't have that cause of action. They wouldn't adjudicate the dispute if those thresholds to findings were contrary.'

The silence in the courtroom was the opening through which Myers drove home his point. Precedence was established in 1937. 'The only difference is that was the estate of a key person who sued. Here we have the estate of rank and file employees. If these insured's have standing to sue, then the seamless web of the law works perfectly.

McMullen was correct. Gerstell was correct. List versus List with the living person was correct.

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The Legislature was correct when it said it was only clarifying the existing law. The dictionary definition of clarify is just to make clear, easy to understand, it doesn't add anything. This seamless web of the law is seamless. Public policy is promoted.' In court filings, Walmart says the amounts of payouts on the 132 Florida employee policies ranged from $55,000 to $90,000.

It said the program was intended to help pay rising employee healthcare costs. It didn't work out and was cancelled in 2000. Surviving family members, like Armatrout and Atkinson, want a share of the $9.6 million Walmart collected on employee life insurance policies. But first, the Florida Supreme Court has to decide if they have standing, that is, the right to sue.

By Despite a supervisor’s alleged statement that a 62-year old Walmart associate was too old to work and his questions as to when she was going to quit, the employee failed to prove by direct evidence that the retail giant fired her because of her age. Nor could she show that Walmart’s proffered reason for terminating her—her coaching for unsafe work practices, which was her fourth coaching overall, required termination under the store’s progressive discipline policy—was pretexutal.

The Sixth Circuit affirmed summary judgment against her age discrimination claim under Michigan’s Elliot-Larsen Civil Rights Act (, September 9, 2016, Daughtrey, M.). Over the course of the employee’s 12-year career at Walmart, she held various positions, the last of which was as an hourly associate in the store’s reclamation department, where she handled claims and returns and arranged and organized merchandize. Pursuant to Walmart’s disciplinary policy, an employee receives a “coaching” if her job performance does not meet the store’s expectations or otherwise violates it policies or procedures. A fourth coaching results in termination.

The employee received her first coaching in January 2011 when she attempted to influence the exchange of her daughter’s damaged laptop for a working one. Her second coaching was eight months later for failing to properly package a hazardous-material item. In August 2012, she received a third coaching for attendance policy violations.

Shortly after that she claimed the store manager, who was responsible for one of the coachings, and a manager who was responsible for another coaching, began to mistreat her and humiliate her. She also claimed that they treated younger associates more favorably and that the manager told her son, also a Walmart employee, “We need to get rid of Reva, she’s too old to work here anymore.” He also purportedly asked her several times when she was going to quit. The employee was fired in March 2013 after the store manager decided she should receive a fourth coaching for failing to follow proper workplace safety standards when she tripped and fell over a cart while stacking merchandize and broke her wrist. She subsequently sued, asserting a claim for age discrimination in violation of the ELCRA.

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Walmart’s motion for summary judgment was granted by the district court. Direct evidence. Although the employee argued on appeal that the manager’s age-related comments were direct evidence of discrimination, the Sixth Circuit disagreed. Not only was he not involved in the termination decision, at the time she was fired he had not been working at that store for at least four months. And while she claimed that the store manager exhibited a “pervasive pattern of discriminatory conduct” toward her by among things, staring at her, not greeting her, and embarrassing her in front of colleagues and vendors, at most this demonstrated that he did not like her, not age-based animus. Circumstantial evidence. Although the employee established a prima facie case of age discrimination under the burden-shifting framework, she failed to show pretext.

She argued that the coachings were fabricated because they were unsigned, but the coaching documents were attached to notarized declarations from Walmart managers with personal knowledge of them. Moreover, the employee acknowledged that each occurred. And although the coachings were not signed by hand, they were acknowledged electronically by the employee and her managers using their user IDs and passwords, which was sufficient under Michigan law. As to her assertion that the first coaching was not a disciplinary action, she conceded that she attempted to assist in the exchange of her daughter’s laptop; she spoke with an electronics associate and customer service manager regarding the exchange; and she met with managers to discuss the incident. She also conceded that a verbal coaching occurs when managers “take you into the office and talk to you about the event.

Basically a warning, a heads-up.” Also rejected was her assertion that the coaching documents should be excluded because copies of them were not in her paper personnel file as required by Michigan law. However, the court pointed out, nothing in the statute dictates that all records relating to an employee must be maintained in a paper-file format. The employee’s attacks on the factual basis for each of the coachings were similarly unsuccessful. Honest belief.

And even if she could successfully dispute her coachings, the court found that she failed to show the store manager did not honestly believe her coaching history justified the termination decision. He reasonably relied on the fact that she had three prior coachings in her record, reviewed each of them, and terminated her based on her coaching history and violation of Walmart’s safety standards.