Senate to Take Up Ledbetter Wage Discrimination Bill

Lilly Ledbetter is retired now at age 70, but the cause she champions is coming to a crucial test.

The former Alabama plant supervisor became a national symbol for pay equity after she lost her battle with Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., where she worked for 20 years before discovering that she earned less than her male colleagues for doing the same job.

“My pension and my Social Security are based on the amount I earned while working there, so this has been a drastic loss for me,” Ledbetter says.  “It’s hard enough in retirement making your income last the rest of your life.”

To prevent others from further pay discrimination, the Senate is expected to take up a bill this week designed to address Ledbetter’s grievance. The bill, called the Fair Pay Act, would allow employees to challenge pay discrimination practices within 180 days of receiving each discriminatory paycheck.

Under current law, employees can only file charges within 180 days of the original discriminatory action, such as when employers set workers’ wages. So if female employees learn years later that they’ve been getting paid less than their male counterparts performing the same work, they cannot file suit because the 180-day time limit from when employers established their pay has run out.

In Ledbetter’s case, she only learned through an anonymous tip in 1998—as she was retiring—that her male colleagues were paid more for performing the same supervisory work.

She filed suit that year but ultimately lost after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the time limit had expired on her pay discrimination claim because Goodyear had made the discriminatory decisions long ago, when her pay was set. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, in her dissenting opinion last year, suggested that the high court’s ruling conflicted with the realities of wage discrimination and urged Congress to take action.

The Senate bill, similar to one passed by the House earlier this month, would close a “flagrant loophole in our civil rights” by strengthening anti-discrimination laws, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., said during a speech on the Senate floor last week (Thursday).

“We cannot turn our back on Americans like Lilly Ledbetter, who play by the rules and suffer discrimination day in and day out,” he said.

Ted Frank, director of the AEI Legal Center for the Public Interest in Washington, says the case that thrust Ledbetter into the nation’s spotlight shouldn’t have come this far. He says statutes of limitations are necessary to prevent people from suing for very old alleged injuries.

“Memories fade, … people change employers,” Frank says. “If an employee can wait until a middle manager of years ago died before accusing the company of discrimination, justice is impossible.”

But Jocelyn Frye, a lawyer for the National Partnership for Women and Families, called the Ledbetter case “extremely troubling” because the high court decision put the burden on workers to discover such pay disparities.

“Pay discrimination is very hard to uncover; most people simply do not know when an employer decides to discriminate against them,” she says. “This legislation is essential for women, for older workers and for disabled workers.”

Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women, criticized the Bush administration last year for siding with Goodyear in a friend-of-the-court brief filed before the high court.

“Women workers certainly deserve better than the 77 cents that they earn to a man's dollar,” she says. “They deserve the right to go to court when they discover they've been paid unfairly. They deserve a Congress and a President who will stand up for them, and a workplace that values their work equally.”