Ah, the Beast…in trouble again. Steven Greenhouse reports today in The New York Times (registration required) on a novel legal twist to trying to hold Wal-Mart accountable. Here are the first two paragraphs:

“A labor rights group filed a class-action lawsuit yesterday against Wal-Mart Stores in which apparel workers in Bangladesh, China and other countries assert that Wal-Mart violated its contractual obligations by not enforcing its code of conduct for overseas contractors.

The lawsuit, filed in state court in Los Angeles, makes the novel argument that Wal-Mart’s code of conduct created contractual obligations between it and thousands of workers employed by contractors who were supposed to comply with the code.”