Kirk votes against the act to essentially let employees sue later than 180 days after the differential starts–IOW, an employee might not know they are being paid less, but they have to sue within 6 months. Seriously. Mr. Concerned moderated joined up with the GOP on this bill to end the ability of women to seek compensation when their employer breaks the law. Concerned indeed.
Seals statement on the vote:
Seals Supports Ledbetter Fair Pay Act
Kirk Sides with Republicans against the Legislation
Wilmette- The United States House of Representatives passed the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act
yesterday 225-199, which reverses a Supreme Court decision limiting the time that
workers have to sue their employers for pay discrimination. The legislation, which
Representative Mark Kirk voted against, would allow employees to sue within 180 days
of their last affected paychecks.
Dan Seals stated, “It is bad enough that the Supreme Court has made it harder for women
to receive equal pay. But when Mark Kirk and his allies tried to keep it that way, they
added insult to injury. This needed to be fixed.”
The following is an Op Ed by Lilly Ledbetter which appeared in the Christian
Science Monitor on July 31, 2007
Equal work, unequal pay
By Lilly Ledbetter
Jacksonville, Ala. – Imagine you’ve worked for a company for 20 years. You’re a good
performer. But unbeknownst to you, the company puts workers over 50 on a lower salary
track. At 60, you learn that for the past 10 years, you have been earning less – tens of
thousands of dollars less – than colleagues doing exactly the same work.
Think you have grounds for a suit? Think again.
The Supreme Court on May 29 ruled 5-4 in Ledbetter (that’s me) v. Goodyear Tire &
Rubber Co. that workers don’t have the right to sue for pay discrimination if they don’t
file a claim within 180 days after the decision is made to pay them less.
Now Congress has the opportunity to redress this injustice. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay
Act will right this wrong. And it will have a profound impact on the working lives, and
livelihoods, of Americans across the country.
This effort to bolster workers’ right began in 1998 when I filed a sex discrimination suit
with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. I did so because I discovered that
the Goodyear plant in Gadsen, Ala., had been paying me significantly less than it paid my
male counterparts.
My salary started out comparable to the male supervisors, but over the years,
unbeknownst to me, my raises were always smaller. Eventually, I learned I was earning
$3,727 a month while the lowest paid of my male colleagues got $4,286 – for doing the
same job.
An Alabama jury awarded me more than $3 million after finding that Goodyear had
violated my rights under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But a federal trial
judge cut that award to $360,000, then an appellate court reversed the jury’s decision and
so I didn’t even get the $360,000.
Then, in the strangest cut of all, the Supreme Court narrowly interpreted Title VII,
completely out of line with legal precedent and sided with Goodyear, arguing that I had
filed the complaint too late since Title VII requires employees to file within 180 days of
“the alleged unlawful employment practice.”
The majority ruling apparently ignored the fact that Goodyear was still underpaying me
when I filed the suit. Instead, calculating the time based on the date I received the first
discriminatory paycheck, years in the past, it ruled that I had missed the deadline for
redress.
In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, the Supreme Court’s only woman, took the
unusual step of reading her opinion aloud. She noted that the original jury heard
testimony that a supervisor who evaluated me in 1997 – an evaluation that led to denyin
me a pay raise – was “openly biased against women.” She wrote: “Toward the end of he
career … the plant manager told Ledbetter that the “plant did not need women, that
[women] didn’t help it, [and] caused problems.”
Substitute any category of work-er for “women” – seniors, Latinos, gays, disabled,
Muslims, etc. – and you can see the impact that results from the court gutting this key
civil rights protection.
While workers’ and civil rights groups are lauding the Ledbetter Act, the bill has met
opposition from the pro-business lobby. Neal Mellon from the US Chamber of
Commerce said that many business owners didn’t want to open themselves up to the
liability of employees filing suits “decades later.” My story shows that filing these suits
decades after the initial discriminatory paycheck is often unavoidable. Each paycheck I
received was an act of discrimination, regardless of the amount of time that passed.
How many workers know what their colleagues make? Do you? I certainly didn’t until
years after the fact. Indeed, one-third of private sector employers bar employees from
discussing their wages with co-workers.
Unless Congress rights this wrong, employers can legally get away with discrimination
so long as they can make it to day 181.
• Lilly Ledbetter, a volunteer and mother of two, has been married for 51 years.
ArchPundit