But the stingy payroll required by the dollar store business model leaves many employees overworked, underpaid and even injured, according to workers and litigation filed over labor practices.
Judge Hellerstein, who oversaw all of the cases, emerged as a champion of the workers as the litigation dragged on.
(And some of the cruelest comments about old workers appear in litigation involving plumbing supplies and fiberglass sales).
"The court's ruling preserves basic ideals of fairness for some of our society's most vulnerable workers," said Chuck Roth, litigation director at the National Immigrant Justice Center in Chicago.
Stephen Darke, the co-head of the global alternative strategist group at Macquarie, said, "Marty would sometimes interrogate a manager until he was sweating, trying to understand how his models worked or whether he or she truly understood the stocks all the way down to the cash flows and the factories and the workers and the litigation around it".
(The company declined to address individual workers' claims, citing litigation).
In the ground zero litigation, workers have complained of more than 350 different diseases.
Pain and Oswestry Disability Index scores have been found to correlate with workers compensation and litigation status in a study of patients with spinal disorders [Prasarn et al., 2012].
Patient factors (diabetes, osteoporosis, cardiopulmonary problems, previous surgery, smoking, worker's compensation, litigation) and surgeon factors (operative experience, patient selection, technical skill, setting) are known to significantly impact outcomes of spinal surgery.
