Class actions and collective employment actions are a way for a number of people, each of whom has a claim that's perceived perhaps by the law as small, to band together and to collectively litigate their claims in a way that gives the old adage, "There's strength in numbers" some truth.  

For example, if a thousand people have all been discriminated against in the same way but each one of them has only suffered a small loss, it would be very difficult for them to vindicate those losses in court.  But by banding together in a class action represented by one attorney but litigating as a group, through a representative plaintiff, each one of those plaintiffs can combine the strength of their individual claims and give the defendant something to think about.

It's very dangerous for defendant's to ignore class or collective actions.  The way they tend to come up in the employment context is through abuses of the wage and hour rules.  If, for example, a company misclassifies a thousand people and each person suffers a loss of $100.00, it would be very difficult for each person to get a lawyer with a claim worth $100.00.  But by combining their actions into a claim worth $100,000.00 it becomes very easy to litigate those claims against the perpetrator.  

What we don't want is for defendant employers to think that they can get away with it with an individual just because that individual only has one voice.