From the ArcaMax Publishing, Ellen Goodman Newsletter:
http://www.arcamax.com/news/ellengoodman/s-341446-664629
BOSTON -- By now the Tale of Lilly Ledbetter is beginning to sound
like the Perils of Pauline or the Pre-Feminist Follies. At 70 years
old, she's the star of a long-running drama about how hard we have to
run to keep from slipping backward.
The Alabama woman was just 26 when Title VII of the Civil Rights Act
of 1964 was passed to enforce equality in the workplace. The old
stalwart -- equal pay for equal work -- is so universally accepted
that we choose to believe it's not just a law but a fact of life.
Our gal Ledbetter, however, worked for two decades in the
not-so-female-friendly ranks of Goodyear. Only when she neared
retirement did an anonymous tipster slip her a reality check about her
paycheck. It turned out that as a female supervisor, she was earning
less than her male counterparts. She was paid on average 79 cents for
every male dollar, a figure suspiciously close to the national wage
gap.
Ledbetter sued and won her case. But Goodyear appealed all the way to
the Supreme Court where Samuel Alito had just replaced Sandra Day
O'Connor. Last year, in one of the backward flips that characterize
the court, a 5-4 majority went against Ledbetter on the grounds that
she hadn't sued in time. The justices read the law through their retro
lens and decided a worker has to sue within six months after her
first unequal pay. It doesn't matter whether she knows she's
being treated unfairly and it doesn't matter if she keeps getting
underpaid.
In essence, as Marcia Greenberger of the National Women's Law Center
said, if a company could pull the wool over an employee's eyes for the
first six months it's free.
An outraged Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called the decision "totally
at odds with the robust protection against workplace discrimination."
She concluded her ringing dissent with an appeal to Congress to
"correct this court's parsimonious reading of Title VII."
Well, the House of Representatives did just that and pretty promptly.
They passed a bill to restore the rules to allow an employee to sue up
to 180 days after the latest unequal paycheck. But when the
bill bearing Lilly Ledbetter's name got to the Senate, the Republicans
balked. There weren't enough Republican defectors to overcome a
filibuster and get the bill on the Senate floor.
Not only did Bush threaten to veto the restoration act, his would-be
successor didn't even take time off the campaign trail to vote. John
McCain let it be known that he opposed the Ledbetter legislation
because it "opens us up to lawsuits for all kinds of problems." This
is a little like saying we shouldn't have any laws because they only
clog up the courts.
So Lilly lost again. Welcome to 2008. Or is it 1964?
If you've been listening lately, the reasons for the tenacious wage
gap between men and women in the 21st century have been dropped on the
lap of working women. Women aren't paid equally because they have this
nasty habit of giving birth. Or they "opt out." Or they choose jobs
that let them get home before the kids' bedtimes. Or they don't know
how to negotiate. The fault is not in our workplaces but in ourselves
that we are paycheck underlings.
The idea that the wage gap might be because of, um, sex discrimination
seems soooo 20th century. In fact, the Supreme Court implied that
Lilly Ledbetter's lower paycheck was her own fault because she didn't
start investigating her employer for sex discrimination as soon as she
started her job.
Today women are a mainstay of family income and often the whole
income. But an entire agenda of work and family issues is stalled
while we're forced to protect -- and sometimes lose -- the gains won
44 years ago.
As for the conductor of the Straight Talk Express? McCain said he was
all in favor of equal pay for equal work, but that women don't need
lawsuits, they need "education and training." So let's begin with a
couple of basics.
Lesson One: An unequal paycheck is a thief that keeps on taking. Even
in retirement, Ledbetter is still, in her own words, "a second-class
worker" with a pension and Social Security check that carry Goodyear's
bite marks.
Lesson Two: In 2008, the Republicans are partying -- political
partying -- like it's 1964.
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Ellen Goodman's e-mail address is ellengoodman@globe.com