Global retailer Wal-Mart has been ordered to pay $172m (£99m) to compensate workers who were refused lunch breaks. A California court found Wal-Mart broke a law requiring employers to give staff an unpaid 30-minute lunch break if they worked more than six hours. The ruling means that more than 100,000 Wal-Mart employees in California will be eligible for compensation.

The company said in a statement that it would appeal against the decision.The statement also said "Wal-Mart has acknowledged it had compliance issues when the statute became effective in 2001. The problems were also experienced by other employers in the State of California.

Wal-Mart has since taken steps to ensure all associate receive their meal periods, including adopting new technology that sends alerts to cashiers when it is time for their meal breaks. The system will automatically shut down registers if the cashier does not respond. During the trial, a California court of appeals made a ruling in another case (Murphy v. Kenneth Cole) that directly supports Wal-Mart's position that the meal-period premiums in question are penalties, rather than wages. This means that punitive damages cannot be recovered in this case.