Today's post is by DMI's Kia Franklin ofTortDeform.com What's the Fair Pay Act? It's no big deal, really. It could only reshape the entire legal terrain of employment discrimination and determine whether employers should be rewarded for successfully hiding discriminatory pay from their employees for at least 180 days. Anyway, why should women gripe about employers paying some employees differently for doing the same job just as well as others?
Okay, so there's the issue of pensions, social security, and other benefits that affect the rest of a person's life, even after a person retires; the need to provide for one's family; principles of fairness, equity, and non-discrimination. Whatever, yada yada yada...
Okay, now that we've had our daily dose of sarcasm, let's be clear: today the Senate is considering a tremendously important bill. We would all do well to pay attention to what happens today with the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act .
The Ledbetter Fair Pay Act would restore the spirit of those laws we often cite to as markers of America's progress, civil rights laws that prohibit employment discrimination.
This includes Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, and the Americans wtih Disabilities Act, among others. The law would clarify that each time an employer issues a paycheck that undercompensates a person because of the person's race, gender, age, or disability status, the time window the employee has for filing a discrimination claim starts anew.
Seem like a no brainer? Well, it was before last summer, when the Supreme Court ruled in Ledbetter v. Goodyear that an employee has a 180 day time window to file a discrimination claim, beginning with the day they receive their very first discriminatory pay check. This is absurd for a number of reasons, including that many employers prohibit employees from discussing and comparing pay so many employees just wouldn't know that they are receiving unequal pay the first time they receive it. Justice Ginsburg said of the decision, to which she dissented, "This Court does not comprehend, or it is indifferent to the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination."
The Ledbetter Fair Pay act would also restore what for some has become lost faith in our legal rights and in our ability to uphold them in our civil court system.
It's not just about fair pay, an important enough issue standing alone. It's also about our ability as individuals to stand up for our legal rights and to fight against others' who wish to suppress or limit them, no matter how powerful or privileged our opponents are. That is, we are told, how the civil justice system works--someone else, like a corporation or another individual, harms us by acting wrongfully. They break a contract, they are negligent, reckless, or they discriminate against us (as was Mrs. Ledbetter's case). We can then hold them accountable for their wrongdoing. In Mrs. Ledbetter's own words: "I was shocked, because there was so much difference in their pay versus mine... I thought and believed that if I had a problem that I could take it to a court system, whether it be local, or federal, or to the Supreme Court."
Thanks to coordinated efforts, led largely by industry lobbyists and the National Chamber of Commerce, our access to the justice system to fight against corporate wrongdoing is under serious attack. Cases like Ledbetter v. Goodyear demonstrate the success of this campaign to generate more sympathy for big corporations and more apathy about the welfare of ordinary people.
Will Mrs. Ledbetter's tireless efforts advocating for this bill, and the efforts of Senator Kennedy, Specter and others help restore our rights to access the civil justice system in this regard? We'll see... after all, it is election year.
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