Best Buy class action might be coming soon

AP is reporting that Best Buy is now facing allegations of employment discrimination.

SAN FRANCISCO - Six former and current employees of Best Buy Co. Inc. have sued the electronics retailer, alleging the company has purposefully excluded women and minorities from top-paying jobs as part of a sales culture catering to white men.

The civil complaint, filed in a San Francisco federal court Thursday, seeks to be certified as a class action so it can potentially represent thousands of women, blacks and Hispanics who work in Best Buy’s 731 stores nationwide. The Minneapolis-based company currently employs about 114,000 workers.

The lawyers who filed the suit also hope to represent women and minorities who applied for jobs at Best Buy, but were never hired. The complaint alleges Best Buy’s managers routinely ignore applications from people “who do not conform to the (company’s) young, white, male culture.”

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Expanding Thursday’s lawsuit into a class action won’t be a simple task.

It took three years and more than 1 million pages of evidence before a similar lawsuit alleging sexual discrimination against Wal-Mart Stores Inc. was certified as a class action in June 2004. Wal Mart, the world’s largest company, is still appealing that suit’s class-action status.

The Wal-Mart suit has emboldened class-action lawyers to target other large employers, said Jeff Tanenbaum, a San Francisco attorney specializing in labor law.