Supreme Court okays paying women less

In a 5-4 decision on May 29, the Supreme Court ruled that it didn’t matter that supervisor Lilly M. Ledbetter had over the course of 20 years been paid less than her male peers. What mattered was a technicality. She hadn’t filed her case (Ledbetter v. Goodyear) with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission within 180 days of the first time the discrimination occurred.

In 1998 Ledbetter, the only woman among 16 supervisors at the same management level, discovered she was being paid as much as 40 percent less than the men, even those with less seniority. Though she started at the same salary, she received smaller and smaller raises between 1979 and 1998.

Ledbetter first faced discrimination in the early 1980s. “My department manager, when he would evaluate me, he would tell me things like, ‘If you meet me at the Ramada Inn, you can be No. 1, and if you don’t, you’re on the bottom,’” Ledbetter told the May 30 New York Times. After the manager demoted her, she filed sex discrimination charges with the EEOC and was eventually reinstated.

Only in the 1990s when she overheard other supervisors bragging about all the money they earned did she suspect discrimination. But that didn’t matter, ruled the Supreme Court. Though other courts have given the 180-day timeline in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act broad interpretation over the years, the new decision applies “even if the effects of the initial discriminatory act were not immediately apparent to the worker and even if they continue to the present day,” wrote the Times.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who wrote a forceful minority decision, pointed out that the ruling ignores “workplace realities” and “is totally at odds with the robust protection against workplace discrimination Congress intended Title VII to secure.” Pointing out that information about pay is all too often veiled in corporate secrecy, she said the court should treat a pay claim like those for a “hostile work environment.” The 2002 decision she cited said that a case could be filed “based on the cumulative effect of individual acts.”

Title VII doesn’t just address discrimination based on sex but also on race and national origin. Between 2001 and 2006 workers filed nearly 40,000 pay discrimination cases. In 2006 alone there were 2,038 cases based on race and 1,469 based on sex under Title VII. Women can also use the Equal Pay Act to redress discrimination, though financial relief is limited and excludes punitive damages. Title VII is the only federal law that men of color and those born outside the U.S. can use to redress discrimination.

No wonder there’s been a firestorm of reaction against the reactionary decision. Groups like the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the National Women’s Law Center and the National Organization for Women have all denounced the decision for severely limiting all workers’ legal options.

Meanwhile business groups are clinking champagne glasses. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s National Chamber Litigation Center hailed the decision as a “victory” because corporations will now be protected from “employees trying to dredge up stale pay claims.”

It’s important to point out that this is the second repressive, regressive Supreme Court decision since April. Then the court upheld what some reproductive rights organizations are calling the National Abortion Ban. The two justices appointed by the current president—Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito—sided with the majority in both cases. That’s not surprising, since George W. Bush appointed them to the court to do his racist, anti-choice, anti-worker bidding.

Though many who oppose Bush see the only solution as supporting the Democrats, who will then hopefully get legislation passed affirming the right of all workers to pay equity, there’s another, surer way to get it. Lower-level managers like Ledbetter can organize to win union representation. Pay scales have to be published in union contracts and must legally be followed by the bosses. That’s another reason all workers need union protection.

Another possibility would be for the two major labor organizations to turn up the heat on the bosses by jointly calling for a national day of protest where workers from coast to coast could demand raises to make up for the last 30 years of inflation, a 30-hour work week for 40 hours’ pay, and pay raises and adjusted Social Security benefits for all workers who have traditionally been discriminated against: women, people of color, members of the LGBT community, people living with mental and physical disabilities, and immigrants.

The New York Times reported on March 27 that a new tax study showed income inequality grew significantly in 2005. “While total reported income in the United States increased almost 9 percent in 2005, average incomes for those in the bottom 90 percent dipped slightly compared with the year before, dropping $172, or 0.6 percent.”

Pay inequality affects all working people. Isn’t it time for workers to unite and demand what’s rightfully theirs?