Court Reverses Decision to Drop Thousands from Sterling Case

New York—A federal appeals court handed the women suing Sterling Jewelers Inc. for gender discrimination a victory earlier this month, marking the latest move in a see-saw legal battle that’s nearly 12 years old.

A group of women, all current and former employees of Sterling, a subsidiary of Signet Jewelers Ltd., filed suit against the jeweler in 2008, alleging they were paid less than men and passed over for promotions.

At the time of their hiring, the women signed an agreement that they would resolve any workplace disputes not in court but via the company’s in-house arbitration system, The Resolve Program.

(For 20 years, all Sterling employees were bound to litigate disputes through Resolve. The company dropped the program in 2018.)

Since the case, Jock vs. Sterling Jewelers Inc., was filed, the two sides have traded appeals over the issue of whether or not Kathleen A. Roberts, a retired federal judge, has the authority as an arbitrator to certify the case as a class action encompassing thousands of employees, not just the dozen women who originally filed suit and the couple hundred who affirmatively opted into the arbitration proceeding.

The last ruling came nearly two years ago, in January 2018, when U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff said Roberts overstepped her bounds in certifying a class of 70,000 women in arbitration and cut down the number of claimants to 254.

The women, through their attorney Joseph Sellers, appealed Rakoff’s decision in 2018 and were handed a victory earlier this month.

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals’ three-panel judge ruled Nov. 18 that in signing the Resolve agreement, employees granted an arbitrator the power to make determinations about legal questions, like class certification.

“We hold,” the judges wrote, “that the arbitrator was within her authority in purporting to bind the absent class members to class proceedings because by signing the operative arbitration agreement, the absent class members, no less than the parties, bargained for the arbitrator’s construction of their agreement with respect to class arbitrability.”

Sellers said Wednesday that the decision is an important and positive step for the women in the Sterling Jewelers case, and confirms the lawfulness of class certification decisions issued by other arbitrators for decades.

Signet and Sterling spokesman David Bouffard said Thursday the company is “looking at its options” for an appeal.

“We are disappointed with the Second Circuit’s ruling,” the retailer said in