Jury Sides With Walmart on Most Claims in Federal Disability Suit, Awards $30,000 to Fayetteville Worker

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – A federal jury sided with Walmart on 18 of 20 claims in a disability discrimination lawsuit over a test the retailer once required new hourly workers to pass, but awarded $30,000 to a former Fayetteville shelf stocker.

The jury of nine returned its verdict Sept. 23 after seven days of trial in U.S. District Court in Fayetteville, according to an order U.S. District Judge David Clay Fowlkes entered Monday. The verdict was unanimous.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued Walmart Inc. and Walmart Stores Arkansas LLC in September 2023 on behalf of former employees with disabilities who were fired after failing the company’s Pathways Graduation Assessment.

Jurors found for the agency on both claims it brought on behalf of Jaclyn Walker: that Walmart failed to make a reasonable accommodation for her disability and that it fired her because of it. They awarded $26,000 on the first claim and $4,000 on the second.

Jurors found for Walmart on the same two claims brought on behalf of nine other former employees. Among them was Glenda Scott, a deaf woman who worked at a Walmart store in North Little Rock.

The jury awarded no punitive damages.

The amount Walmart owes could change. The verdict form for the firing claim did not cover lost wages or benefits, and Fowlkes gave the agency until Oct. 8 to file a motion for equitable relief on Walker’s claims. The agency’s complaint sought back pay and reinstatement, among other things. The judge said he will enter a final judgment after ruling on that request.

Walmart began requiring entry-level hourly workers at its Supercenters and Neighborhood Markets nationwide to complete the Pathways training program in 2016, according to a Sept. 9 order in the case. Workers had to pass a computer-based assessment at the end of the program to keep their jobs.

The agency’s complaint said workers got three attempts to pass and that Walmart stopped using the assessment in 2020.

Walmart hired Walker as a shelf stocker in November 2017, according to the Sept. 9 order. She has a learning and speech disability and received accommodations in school, the order said.

After Walker and her father spoke with the store manager about her disability, the manager emailed Walmart’s home office on June 25, 2018, according to the order.

“She has a learning disability and we did not make an accommodation on her graduation attempts,” the manager wrote, according to the order. “How can I make the accommodation for her and get her out of exit review?”

The manager was told to submit a form to request an exception and was later told one would not be granted, the order said. Walker was fired in August 2018 for failing the assessment three times.

Walmart argued that Walker did not provide documentation of her need for an accommodation when the company asked for it, according to the order.

Scott communicates primarily in American Sign Language. She passed the assessment at a Walmart store in Pine Bluff with help from an instructor, then was required to complete the training again when she went to work at the North Little Rock store in 2018, the order said.

Scott asked an assistant store manager for a sign language interpreter but did not receive help with the training or the assessment, according to the order. She failed three times in May 2018 and was fired that August.

The case was narrowed before it reached the jury. In the Sept. 9 order, Fowlkes threw out the agency’s broadest claim, that the assessment itself unlawfully screened out people with disabilities.

The judge wrote that the agency presented no statistical evidence that the assessment had a disproportionate effect on people with disabilities. Of 711,403 workers who took it, Walmart gave the agency contact information for 5,391 who were fired after failing, the order said. The agency identified 226 people who may have been affected and brought claims on behalf of 11 of them, the order said.

Fowlkes also rejected the agency’s request for a court order barring Walmart from discriminating on the basis of disability, calling the proposed language “impermissibly vague.”

That left two claims for each worker: failure to accommodate and discriminatory firing.