Time to Write Your Senator

When I read the article "Courting Disaster" by Stephanie Mencimer my jaw dropped. Then I wanted to punch something or scream or march to Washington. I don't want to have all the fun so take a gander at the first three paragraphs of her article:

Lilly Ledbetter got her 15 minutes of fame, but a little press won't cover the mortgage. The 59-year-old mother of two had spent 19 years working at the Goodyear tire factory in Gadsden, Alabama, as one of the few women in a supervisory position. In 1998, after learning she'd been getting paid far less than men doing similar jobs, she sued Goodyear under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, alleging gender discrimination in the performance evaluations that had resulted in her lower pay. Five years later, with the backing of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Ledbetter won a $3.8 million jury verdict against the company. But Goodyear appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled against Ledbetter last June. The court's conservative faction concluded that Ledbetter was obliged to sue within 180 days of receiving her first discriminatory paycheck, and was therefore out of luck.

The 5-4 decision reversed decades of established law in most states. The EEOC had long held that each discriminatory paycheck resets the clock on the statute of limitations, so that workers could sue from the time they learned of the pay disparity, not from the date the disparity began. That makes sense: Most people don't know what their colleagues are paid, and many companies actively forbid workers from discussing their salaries on the job. Ledbetter only learned how badly she was underpaid after someone put an anonymous note in her mailbox listing the salaries of some of the factory's male supervisors—by that time, she'd been getting smaller paychecks for years.

The Supreme Court ruling effectively prevents anyone from suing under federal equal-pay laws, and creates a perverse incentive: So long as an employer manages to keep an employee's discriminatory compensation under wraps for six months, he or she is then free to continue discriminating against the worker without fear of lawsuits. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was so outraged by the majority decision that she read her scathing dissent from the bench. "In our view, the court does not comprehend, or is indifferent to, the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination," she said, and urged Congress to "correct this parsimonious reading" of the civil rights law.

YOu GO Ruth Bader Ginsburg!!! As for the rest of those other 5 judges, who gave them that job? What are THEY thinking? I can understand wanting to cut down on the number of law suits but this is the best idea they can come up with? Making sure no equal pay suit can come to trial? Way to go GUYS, thanks for a better America.

Now the only way to blunt their ruling is to get Congress to do some legislation. I'm writing my senator. I urge you to do the same.

And I'm never buying Good Year Tires again.

You can read more about the case here and here.