Regulation via Litigation

For all the talk of populism, the Trump Administration is preoccupied with easing federal oversight of big business. It’s done this through attempts to undo regulations and by weakening enforcement of the rules that remain. Sure, there are areas in which it is politically expedient to pretend to be tough on corporate misconduct. That’s what we see with drug prices or the current Boeing scandal, but for the most part companies are getting what they want.

It’s a different story in the courts. In recent days there has been a slew of major settlements and verdicts in which large corporations will be paying out substantial sums to resolve various allegations of wrongdoing.

Purdue Pharma and the Sackler Family agreed to pay $270 million to the state of Oklahoma to resolve a lawsuit relating to the company’s role in the opioid crisis that has taken the lives of more than 200,000 people in the United States. Many more such lawsuits involving other states are expected to follow.

Johnson & Johnson and Bayer agreed to pay $775 million to settle about 25,000 lawsuits involving the blood thinner Xarelto, which they jointly sell. The suits allege that the companies failed to warn patients that the drug could trigger potentially fatal massive bleeding.

A federal jury in California ordered Monsanto to pay $80 million to a man who alleged that he developed cancer as a result of using the company’s controversial weedkiller Roundup. The jury found that Monsanto was liable because it failed to include a warning label about the cancer risk. Monsanto’s parent, the German chemical company Bayer, said it will appeal the verdict. Also under appeal is another Roundup verdict from last year in which the plaintiff was awarded $289 million (lowered by the judge to $80 million).

Many more lawsuits are in the works, in some cases threatening the survival of companies. Pacific Gas & Electric had to file for bankruptcy protection in the face of tens of billions of dollars in potential liability in connection with California wildfires believed to have been caused by its aging transmission lines. A ruling by the Connecticut Supreme Court allowing wrongful marketing claims cases against gun makers may lead to billions in settlements by the industry.

Such litigation is nothing new, but the cases are taking on increasing importance in the fight against corporate misconduct at a time when federal regulation is faltering. The danger is that lawmakers and the courts themselves may curtail the ability to bring these lawsuits. There is not much they can do when the suits are brought by state attorneys general, but class actions may be more vulnerable.

This is already happening in the area of employment law. In 2011 the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed a nationwide gender discrimination suit against Walmart and made it more difficult to get such classes of plaintiffs certified. Last year, in the Epic Systems case, the high court made it easier for employers to use arbitration agreements to block lawsuits over issues such as wage theft.

If litigation goes the way of regulation and there are no effective controls on corporate behavior, we will be in big trouble.

Regulatory Charade

It always seems to take a tragedy to reveal the truth about the regulatory system in the United States. After an explosion at an oil refinery, a massive oil spill, a major outbreak of food poisoning, a coal mine collapse or a train derailment, it comes to light that regulators, rather than being the overbearing bureaucrats depicted by corporate apologists, are often unequipped to exercise adequate oversight of the operations of big business.

That scenario is playing out once again in the wake of two deadly crashes of Boeing’s newest passenger jet. Day after day we are learning more details of how an under-resourced Federal Aviation Administration cut corners in its review of the company’s 737 Max.  The agency, pursuing a new approach that has been in the works for years, delegated key portions of the approval process to Boeing itself, including the assessment of a new software system that has been implicated in the crashes.

Critics have long complained that regulators have frequently been captured by the corporations they are supposed to oversee, meaning that those companies exercise undue influence over the agencies. What’s been going on at the FAA is even more pernicious. Boeing is not just swaying the FAA; it is supplanting it. Rather than regulatory capture, this is regulatory eradication.

The idea that corporations should be allowed to oversee themselves is unwise in general but particularly wrong-headed when it comes to a company like Boeing. The aircraft producer has a long record of safety lapses. This goes back decades. For example, after a Japan Air Lines 747 crashed during a domestic flight in 1985, killing 520 people, Boeing admitted that it had performed faulty repairs on the plane’s rear safety bulkhead.

In 1989 the FAA proposed a then-record fine of $200,000 against Boeing for failing to promptly report the discovery that fire extinguishers on two 757s were faulty.

In 1994 the Seattle Times, after reviewing 20 years of reports submitted to the FAA, concluded that more than 2,700 Boeing 737s then in service were flying with a defective part that could cause the plane’s rudder to move unpredictably, possibly turning the aircraft in the opposite direction being steered by the pilot.

These kinds of problems continued. In January 2013, after several incidents in which lithium-ion batteries in 787s caught fire, the FAA ordered the grounding of all U.S.-based Dreamliners. The head of the National Transportation Safety Board accused the company of having submitted flawed safety test results on the batteries.

This history apparently did not factor into the FAA’s decision to rely heavily on Boeing during the 737 Max approval process and it did not prevent the agency from resisting calls to ground the jet until pretty much all of the rest of the world took that common-sense step following the crash in Ethiopia.

Shamed into action, the FAA is now behaving more like a real regulator again. Yet this too is part of the typical scenario: when outrage about a deadly incident escalates, an agency acts tough. But this rarely lasts. Once the uproar dies down, the regulators return to their comfortable relationship with the regulated, and the public is once again put at risk.

Shattering Myths About Business and Society

Those who believe that corporate executives are virtuous, government regulators are overreaching, and that we live in a meritocracy have been cringing every time they listened to a newscast in recent days. That’s because two major stories have been shattering myths about the way things work in the U.S. business world and the broader society.

The controversy over whether Boeing’s 737 Max aircraft should be grounded in the wake of a deadly crash in Ethiopia revealed the true nature of business regulation in the United States. Contrary to the image, depicted ad nauseum by corporate apologists, of bureaucrats crippling companies with unnecessary and arbitrary rules, we saw in the Federal Aviation Administration an agency that is essentially held captive by airlines and aircraft manufacturers.

It was only after the rest of the world ignored assurances from Boeing and took the common-sense step of grounding the planes that the FAA finally acted. The agency, its parent Department of Transportation and the Trump Administration had to be shamed into fulfilling their responsibility of protecting the public.

It remains to be seen whether the Trump Administration will temper its anti-regulatory rhetoric after this incident in which it was clear that the country needed more rather than less oversight. Unfortunately, the problem goes beyond rhetoric.

Since taking office, Trump has made it a crusade to dismantle much of the deregulatory system. Left to his own devices, Trump would continue on this path. His new budget proposes massive cuts in the budgets of regulatory agencies, including 31 percent at the EPA.

That budget was dead on arrival in the Democratic-controlled House, but the administration is undermining agencies by rolling back enforcement activity. Public Citizen has been documenting this ploy in a series of reports drawing on data from Violation Tracker. Its latest study shows a 37 percent drop in enforcement actions by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Federal Trade Commission and the Consumer Product Safety Commission during Trump’s first two years, compared to the final two years of the Obama era.

The other big myth-busting story is the admissions scandal at elite universities. The revelation that wealthy parents have been paying large sums to a fixer who bribed coaches and used other fraudulent means to get their kids into the Ivy League should cause all critics of affirmative action to hang their heads in shame.

It speaks volumes that one of the parents arrested in the case is William McGlashan, founder of The Rise Fund, an ethical investing vehicle managed by the private equity firm TPG Capital. Working with the likes of Bono and philanthropist Pierre Omidyar, the fund says it is “committed to achieving social and environmental impact alongside competitive financial returns.”

Defenders of the fund will attempt to separate its mission from McGlashan’s personal issues. Yet the scandal helps puncture the image of moral superiority projected by those who claim they can do good and get richer at the same time. It gives more ammunition to those who suspect that ethical investing may be little more than a way to ease the conscience of the wealthy with more than their share of misdeeds.

Undoubtedly, protectors of the conventional wisdom are seeking ways to restore support for the notions that regulation is bad and that the rich are good people who earned everything they have. Yet for now, let’s enjoy these moments of clarity.

Resisting the Trump Organization Business Model

A recent 60 Minutes episode provided further evidence of how the pharmaceutical industry successfully pressured federal regulators to allow excessive prescribing of powerful opioids, paving the way for the ongoing epidemic of fatal overdoses. In recent days there have been reports that Purdue Pharma, the company at the center of the crisis, is planning a bankruptcy filing to reduce the risk from the 1,600 lawsuits that have been brought against the company.

These developments illustrate how the main structures that are supposed to deter corporate misconduct – government regulation and the civil justice system – are not up to the task. Despite the endless complaints from the business world about rules and lawsuits, there are in fact few meaningful limits on corporate behavior.

Despite years of evidence showing that many industries dominate and neutralize the government agencies that are supposed to oversee them, the proponents of deregulation all too often carry the day. The current presidential administration has embraced that ideology whole-heartedly and has even tried to promote the idea that relaxed regulation benefits not only corporations but workers and consumers.

Yet there’s growing evidence that what interests Trump most is using regulatory powers to punish his political enemies and reward his friends. That’s the message of new reporting by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker that Trump personally urged the Justice Department to try to block AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner, apparently thinking that by sinking the deal he would harm Time Warner’s CNN unit and boost its rival, the exceedingly Trump-friendly Fox News.

There were earlier reports that Trump’s criticism of Amazon’s contract with the U.S. Postal Service was an indirect assault on the Washington Post, owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

Aside from being an obvious abuse of presidential power, this approach is no better than a “principled” deregulatory stance. While Trump may occasionally direct his ire against companies that deserve to be punished, the vast majority of miscreants will end up being let off the hook.

Many of the same business apologists who criticize regulation also fulminate against lawsuits. These tort reformers don’t explain how else we are supposed to deal with rogue corporations. Nor do they acknowledge that such companies can greatly limit their exposure with the help of the bankruptcy court.

Purdue Pharma would be far from the first corporation to use Chapter 11 in this way. The filing would not shield the company entirely, but it would greatly reduce its financial liability and make it easier to survive the process.

Moreover, the Wall Street Journal pointed out that “Purdue’s assets may not be enough to resolve the company’s potential liability, in part because most of its profits had been regularly transferred to members of the company’s controlling family, the Sacklers.” In other words, much of the corporation’s ill-gotten gains are already out of the reach of the plaintiffs.

When restraints are weak or non-existent, it is more likely that companies will adopt the business model of the Trump Organization, which appears to be that of breaking every rule and cheating everyone it can. Our challenge is to find new ways to fight back.

A Reputation for Purity is Now in Tatters

For the tens of millions of baby boomers in the United States, the first large corporation whose products they encountered was probably Johnson & Johnson. That’s because the vast majority of parents in the postwar period used the company’s baby shampoo, oil and powder on their precious bundles of joy. Carefully cultivating an image of purity, J&J established itself as an indispensable part of infant care.

That image is now in tatters. The company just disclosed that it is being investigated by the Justice Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission and Congress in connection with possible asbestos contamination of its baby powder and other talc-based products. These probes were prompted by investigative reporting in outlets such as the New York Times alleging that J&J executives raised internal concerns about the asbestos issue decades ago but the company never acknowledged these publicly.

These revelations gave more credence to thousands of lawsuits filed against J&J in recent years by women, including many who used the company’s baby powder on themselves as well as their infants, charging that the products caused them to develop ovarian cancer. J&J has been losing a lot of these cases, including one in which a jury awarded $4.7 billion in damages to a group of 22 women.

Rarely has a product’s reputation fallen so far, and rarely has a company once held in such high esteem come to be regarded as morally equivalent to cigarette manufacturers. Yet a closer look at J&J’s track record shows that its immaculate reputation has been deteriorating for quite some time.

Over the past decade the company has been involved in a series of scandals and has been forced it to pay out large sums in civil settlements and criminal fines.

The most serious of those cases involved allegations that several of its subsidiaries marketed prescription drugs for purposes not approved as safe by the Food and Drug Administration, thus creating potentially life-threatening risks for patients.

For example, in 2013 the Justice Department announced that J&J and several of its subsidiaries would pay more than $2.2 billion in criminal fines and civil settlements to resolve allegations that the company had marketed it anti-psychotic medication Risperdal and other drugs for unapproved uses as well as allegations that they had paid kickbacks to physicians and pharmacists to encourage off-label usage. The amount included $485 million in criminal fines and forfeiture and $1.72 billion in civil settlements with both the federal government and 45 states that had also sued the company.

Other J&J problems resulted from faulty production practices. During 2009 and 2010 the company had to announce around a dozen recalls of medications, contact lenses and hip implants. The most serious of these was the massive recall of liquid Tylenol and Motrin for infants and children after batches of the medication were found to be contaminated with metal particles.

The company’s handling of the matter was so poor that its subsidiary McNeil-PPC became the subject of a criminal investigation and later entered a guilty plea and paid a criminal fine of $20 million and forfeited $5 million.

J&J also faced criminal charges in an investigation of questionable foreign transactions. In 2011 it agreed to pay a $21.4 million criminal penalty as part of a deferred prosecution agreement with the Justice Department resolving allegations of improper payments by J&J subsidiaries to government officials in Greece, Poland and Romania in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The settlement also covered kickbacks paid to the former government of Iraq under the United Nations Oil for Food Program.

All of this has been a humiliating comedown for a company that was once regarded as a model of corporate social responsibility and which set the standard for crisis management in its handling of the 1980s episode in which a madman laced packages of Tylenol with cyanide. While the company was then being victimized, in the subsequent crises it mainly has itself to blame. Off-label marketing, faulty production practices and foreign bribery are bad, but the current scandal over asbestos contamination and the alleged cover-up pose a threat to the survival of the company.  

A Major Rebuke to Corporate Arrogance

New York City’s progressive elected officials, unions and community activists have just delivered what may be the most remarkable rebuke to corporate influence ever seen in the United States. In forcing Amazon.com to drop its plan for a satellite headquarters campus with 25,000 employees, arranged through a deal including some $3 billion in subsidies, progressives have up-ended a decades-old dynamic in which large corporations have used job creation promises to get state and local officials to hand over vast amounts of taxpayer funds to underwrite private business expansion.

Traditionally, opponents of big subsidy deals were accused of being job killers and of ruining the “business climate.” Amazon’s opponents in New York overrode those criticisms with their arguments that the giant retailer did not need or deserve enormous tax breaks and that the city should be devoting its financial resources to more pressing public needs.

Part of what fueled the opposition was Amazon’s reputation as a low-road employer, especially in its distribution centers. The company made no attempt to hide this fact. When asked during a city council meeting whether Amazon would remain neutral during any organizing drives at its facilities, a company executive quickly replied: “No.”

What also helped is that New York’s economy is far from desperate and is much larger than the arenas in which Amazon is used to operating. For many places, the prospect of thousands of jobs could be a matter of survival. That’s why southeastern Wisconsin was willing to offer Foxconn billions in subsidies for a flat-screen plant that probably will never be built.

In New York, 25,000 jobs were seen less as the basis for an economic transformation and more as a recipe for a worsening of the city’s severe housing and transit problems. The side effects of a major project, which in the past were usually an afterthought, in this case took center stage.

More broadly speaking, what probably did Amazon in was its arrogance. It had spent more than a year conducting an elaborate HQ2 competition in which officials from more than 200 localities eagerly participated. Amazon came to view itself as kind of corporate divinity, to which communities were supposed to bow down.

Although Gov. Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio were among those participants, the people of New York were a lot less inclined to play the game. They simply could not understand why a megacorporation controlled by the wealthiest man in the world needed a handout from them in order to expand its operations. By scorning Amazon, New Yorkers are sending a powerful message to all large corporations: you should no longer assume that by dangling dubious promises of job creation you can raid public resources and ignore the social impacts of your expanded operations.  Ask not what our communities can do for you, ask what you can do for us.

Trump’s Muddled Class Warfare

Among the various roles played by Donald Trump during his State of the Union address was that of class warrior. He described a divide between “wealthy politicians and donors” living in gated communities while supposedly pushing for open borders and “working class Americans” who are “left to pay the price for illegal immigration—reduced jobs, lower wages, overburdened schools, hospitals that are so crowded you can’t get in, increased crime, and a depleted social safety net.”

Trump’s efforts to stir up worker resentment focus almost exclusively on situations in which foreigners can be depicted as the real culprits. He has no difficulty demonizing undocumented immigrants or the Chinese government, yet he rarely has any critical words for the traditional targets of populist anger: the super-wealthy and powerful corporations. On the contrary, those interests have enjoyed a privileged place during the Trump era, receiving lavish benefits in the form of tax breaks and regulatory rollbacks.

The latest example of the latter came less than 24 hours after Trump concluded his remarks in the House chamber. His Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced plans to gut restrictions on payday lenders that were developed during the Obama Administration and were scheduled to take effect later this year.

The new rules were designed to put the responsibility on lenders to make sure their customers could afford the loans they were being offered. This was seen as a necessary safeguard in an industry notorious for charging astronomical interest rates to vulnerable customers who frequently ended up with massive debts after rolling over a series of short-term loans.

Prior to being neutered by the Trump Administration, the CFPB conducted a series of enforcement actions against payday lenders for egregious practices. For example, in 2014 the bureau brought a $10 million action against ACE Cash Express, alleging that the company “used illegal debt collection tactics – including harassment and false threats of lawsuits or criminal prosecution – to pressure overdue borrowers into taking out additional loans they could not afford.”

Payday lending has effectively been outlawed in about 20 states, but the Obama-era rules would have made a big difference in the rest of the country where the disreputable business is still allowed to function with annual interest rates of 300 percent or more. It will come as no surprise that many of the latter states are ones in which Trump enjoys high levels of popularity.

I can’t help but wonder what working class Trump supporters will think of this policy. Coal miners cannot be completely faulted for believing that Trump’s moves to dismantle power-plant emission controls may help them get work, but will struggling low-income families be cheered to learn that the administration is making it easier for payday lenders to exploit them rather than following the lead of the states that put a lid on usury?

Or, to put it more broadly, how long will Trump be able to pretend to be a working-class populist while pursuing the worst kind of plutocratic policies?

Backlash of the Billionaires

Most of those who have thrown their hat in the ring for the 2020 presidential race have been met with varying mixtures of enthusiasm and indifference. Howard Schultz is another story. The former Starbucks CEO has engendered a wave of hostility based on concern that his plan to run as an independent would split the anti-Trump vote and usher in another term for the current occupant of the White House.

Schultz is making himself even more unpopular by unleashing a string of attacks on some of the key policy proposals being discussed by progressive Democrats, denouncing Medicare for All and taxes on the wealthy as un-American and ill-informed.

This could simply be an appeal to what remains of the right flank of the Democrats, but it also seems to be part of an emerging backlash among the super-wealthy and corporate elites to a progressive agenda that would affect them directly. Schultz is not the only billionaire complaining at the prospect of having to pay more to Uncle Sam. Michael Bloomberg, another potential presidential contender, has been mouthing off against Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax idea and defending U.S.-style capitalism.

We may soon see large corporations speaking out as well. Foxconn did not explicitly link its decision to abandon plans to create 13,000 manufacturing jobs in Wisconsin to the election of progressive Tony Evers as governor, but Republican leaders in the state legislature are making the connection.

Big business has had the best of both worlds during the past two years. While a few corporations such as Foxconn have directly aligned themselves with Trump, most large companies have dissociated themselves from the president’s odious positions on immigration and nationalism. Some business figures such as Larry Fink of BlackRock have been promoting the idea that they are the true paradigms of civic virtue.

At the same time, these executives and their corporations have been making out like bandits from the tax breaks and regulatory rollbacks—including those eroding worker protections–promoted by the faux-populist Trump Administration and its Republican allies in Congress.

The time may soon be coming when large corporations and billionaires have to choose between pretending they are part of the resistance and giving up some of their economic privileges. Or maybe they will lose both.

After all, the idea that large corporations are a force for good is already a dubious notion. Take the case of Starbucks, which has cultivated an image of being a progressive employer but has had to pay more than $46 million to resolve collective-action lawsuits alleging wage and hour violations.

The big question is whether big business and the super wealthy will accept that they have to give back some of their advantages. We know that the likes of the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson will fight to their last breath. The Foxconn disinvestment decision could be a harbinger of a coming capital strike in some quarters.  

Yet it will be more interesting to see how far purported liberals like Schultz and Bloomberg are willing to go in resisting progressive reforms, and whether they will be joined by the corporate social responsibility crowd.  In the words of the old union song, they will have to decide which side they are on.

Mistreating Customers and Workers

For a long time, the corporation that stood out as America’s worst employer was Walmart, given its reputation for shortchanging workers on pay, engaging in discriminatory practices and ruthlessly fighting union organizing drives. Today, Amazon.com seems to be trying to take over that title, at least for its blue-collar workforce.

Yet when we look at the corporations that have been paying the most penalties for workplace abuses, there is another contender for the top, or really the bottom, spot among U.S. employers: Bank of America. In Big Business Bias, a report just published by the Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First, we found that BofA has paid more in damages, settlements and fines in workplace discrimination and harassment cases than any other large for-profit corporation.

In Grand Theft Paycheck, a report we published last year on wage theft, BofA ranked third (after Walmart and FedEx) in total penalties paid in private wage and hour lawsuits and cases brought by the U.S. Labor Department.

BofA’s position in these tallies is to a significant extent the result of cases brought against its subsidiary Merrill Lynch, which the federal government pressured it to acquire during the financial meltdown in 2008. Merrill accounts for 95 percent of the $210 million in penalties BofA has paid in discrimination cases and more than one-quarter of the $381 million paid in wage theft cases.

Merrill brought with it problems beyond questionable personnel practices. In 1998 it had to pay $400 million to settle charges that it helped push Orange County, California into bankruptcy with reckless investment advice. In 2002 it agreed to pay $100 million to settle charges that its analysts skewed their advice to promote the firm’s investment banking business (plus another $100 million the following year). In 2003 it paid $80 million to settle allegations relating to dealings with Enron.

This track record was similar to that of BofA before the merger. For example, in 1998 the bank paid $187 million to settle allegations that in its role as bond trustee for the California state government it misappropriated funds, overcharged for services and destroyed evidence of its misdeeds. BofA later paid to settle lawsuits concerning its dealings with Enron ($69 million) and another corporate criminal, WorldCom ($460 million).

In the wake of the financial crisis, BofA had to enter into several multi-billion-dollar settlements concerning the sale of toxic securities and various mortgage abuses. It is for all these reasons that BofA tops the Violation Tracker ranking of the most penalized parent companies, with payouts of more than $58 billion.

BofA is not unique in this respect. Another major bank is also one of the ten most penalized corporations overall as well as high on the lists of those with the most penalties related to workplace discrimination and wage theft. That bank is Wells Fargo, which ranks sixth on the Violation Tracker list with over $14 billion in penalties, ninth in the discrimination tally with $68 million and fourth in the wage theft tally with $205 million.

Wells Fargo, of course, is notorious for creating millions of bogus accounts to generate illicit fees and other deceptive practices. Last year, the Federal Reserve took the unprecedented step of barring the bank from growing any larger until it cleaned up its act. The agency also announced that the bank had been pressured to replace four members of its board of directors.

Bank of America and Wells Fargo demonstrate all too clearly that mistreatment of customers can go hand-in-hand with mistreatment of workers.

Big Business Bias

The immediate culprits in many workplace discrimination and harassment cases are individual managers or co-workers, but in many situations the worst villain is the employer that fails to stop the abuse or engages in its own unfair practices.

The Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First has just published a report called Big Business Bias showing for the first time which large corporations have paid the most to plaintiffs in discrimination or harassment cases based on race, gender, religion, national origin, age or disability.

As in many other things, the big banks turn out to be leading offenders. Bank of America (including its subsidiary Merrill Lynch) has paid a total of $210 million since 2000, more than any other large company. Morgan Stanley ranks fourth at $150 million and Wells Fargo ranks ninth at $68 million. The financial services industry overall has paid a total of $530 million in penalties. The retail sector has paid the same amount, so the two industries have the dubious distinction of being tied for first place.

The report, based on data collected for an expansion of the Violation Tracker database, covers private lawsuits (both class action and individual) brought in federal or state court as well as cases brought with the involvement of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and the U.S. Labor Department’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP). It focuses on cases brought against corporations (and their subsidiaries) included in the Fortune 1000, the Fortune Global 500 and Forbes’ list of America’s Largest Private Companies.

We found that virtually every large company has paid damages or reached an out-of-court settlement in at least one discrimination or harassment lawsuit, but in the vast majority of cases the terms of the settlements were kept confidential. Our report is based on the subset of those cases with disclosed settlements as well as those with public court verdicts and EEOC or OFCCP penalties.

The report finds that since the beginning of 2000, large corporations are known to have paid $2.7 billion in penalties, including $2 billion in 234 private lawsuits, $588 million in 329 EEOC actions and $81 million in 117 OFCCP cases.

Following Bank of America in the ranking of most-penalized large companies are Coca-Cola ($200 million) and Novartis ($183 million). The corporation with the largest number of cases with disclosed penalties is Walmart, at 27. Its penalty total of $52 million would have been much higher if the U.S. Supreme Court had not ruled 5-4 in 2011 to dismiss a nationwide gender discrimination class action against the company.

Following banks and retailers, the industries with the most disclosed penalties are food/beverage products ($252 million), pharmaceuticals ($209 million) and freight/logistics ($187 million).

Race and gender cases (mainly relating to hiring, promotion and pay) account for the largest shares of discrimination penalties, with each category totaling just over $1 billion. Age discrimination cases rank third with over $240 million in penalties, followed by disability cases at $155 million and sexual harassment cases at $123 million.

Employees at all levels of the occupational hierarchy have filed discrimination lawsuits against large corporations. The report documents lawsuits whose plaintiffs range from executives, managers and professionals to blue-collar and service workers. However, it finds that managers are more likely to bring age discrimination cases while racial bias and sexual harassment suits more often are filed by blue-collar and service workers.

In addition to supporting the call by the #MeToo movement to end non-disclosure agreements and mandatory arbitration, the report endorses reforms that would require publicly-traded companies and large federal contractors to disclose how much they pay out each year in aggregate damages and settlements in discrimination and harassment cases.

Note: details on all the cases analyzed in the report can be found in Violation Tracker.