1. If you think your employer is discriminating against you by paying you less than your fellow employees for similar duties, don't wait - file a claim right away.
2. Do whatever you can to find out how much your colleagues doing the same job are being paid.
3. President George W. Bush wasn't kidding when he said Justice Samuel J. Alito Jr. would be a strict constructionist.
It was Alito who wrote the 5-4 majority decision, announced Tuesday, that said Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. wasn't guilty of violating Section VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act even though for years it had paid Lilly Ledbetter as much as 40% less than male colleagues doing the same supervisory job. Justice Alito said the language of Section VII was clear: People who feel they've been discriminated against have only 180 days from the first "discrete act" of discrimination to file a complaint.
It took Ledbetter years to discover that her male colleagues had been getting bigger raises than she had, a fact she blamed on her refusal to accede to her boss's sexual demands. Workers at Goodyear's Gadsden, Ala., factory, like workers in most places, have no idea what their colleagues are paid. By 1998, when Ledbetter discovered she'd been left behind, she was being paid $3,727 a month, some $559 a month less than the lowest paid man doing comparable work.
So she sued. In similar cases, the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission consistently had ruled that every unequal paycheck was, in effect, a new act of discrimination that reset the 180-day deadline for filing a discrimination suit. The High Court's majority rejected that argument, saying that the first discrete act of discrimination took place 20 years ago, and the deadline for complaints had long since passed. Any other reading of the statute, Alito wrote, is a "policy argument" not borne out in the language of the law.
This is the sort of strict legal philosophy Bush endorsed in 2005 in naming then-Judge Alito to succeed the retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. It's impossible to know how O'Connor would have voted in Ledbetter, but the court's first woman justice might well have been more sympathetic to Lilly Ledbetter's plight. The court's only other woman justice certainly was.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, reading her dissent from the bench, said the court's majority "does not comprehend, or is indifferent to, the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination." Women employees, she said, often try to avoid "making waves," so a small discrepancy in pay can, over time, grow into a large problem. Besides, she said, it was unrealistic to believe that employees can determine within 180 days that they're not being treated fairly.
This too-narrow decision could affect other causes of alleged discrimination as well. Employees who believe they're being treated differently because of their race, ethnicity, religion or causes must abide by the same 180-day deadline, even though such treatment often becomes apparent only over time.
It would be nice to think that employers won't use this ruling as a loophole to discriminate in the future or to perpetuate discriminatory policies rooted in the past. In a perfect world, that wouldn't happen. In the real world, six months must tell the tale.
Reprinted from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
