President Obama is set to sign his first piece of legislation this week - the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. You may remember Ledbetter's case. She worked for Goodyear tire and rubber for most of her career, and found out after many years that she had been paid less than the men doing the same job all along. To add insult to injury, she had trained a couple of these guys.
The George W. Bush/ Roberts/Alito Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that though Ledbetter had indeed experienced discrimination, she was not entitled to damages because she hadn't filed her lawsuit within 180 days of that first short paycheck - never mind that she didn't discover the discrimination for more than a decade. The ruling overturned 40+ years of precedent. Up until Ledbetter v. Goodyear, courts had always ruled that a victim of wage discrimination had 180 days from the day she found out about it to file suit, and that each new short paycheck started the countdown clock over again. In passing the new bill, Congress and President Obama have restored the law to the way it has been interpreted for the last four decades.
But if you think that's the answer to women's pay inequity prayers, you're dead wrong. Just getting us back to even is not nearly enough to overcome that stubborn wage gap. Women still make only 77 cents to the dollar a man makes for full time year round work. We need more - much more. The main reason Lilly Ledbetter got shafted was that she didn't know her situation compared to the men. Employers are under no obligation to report pay statistics, and in most companies you can get fired for talking pay with co-workers. Though federal legislation to fix these two problems is in the pipeline, it's been in the pipeline for over a decade, and the light at the end is nowhere in sight.
The governor of one state - New Mexico - is not waiting. Bill Richardson (Obama's choice for commerce secretary who voluntarily dropped out of consideration) has just signed an executive order in his state that is ground breaking. Not only will the state as an employer have to study and report it's own pay practices when it comes to gender and race, so will private sector companies that want state contracts. Richardson has declared overcoming pay inequity and job segregation a priority, and established a high-powered task force to implement the needed changes.
Employers are likely to wail and gnash their teeth. Won't this cost money? Well maybe, but probably not that much. They already know who works for them, the gender and race of their employees, and how much they're paid by job category. So gathering the data ought to be relatively simple. Besides, all employers won't have to do it - just those that want state contracts, paid with dollars from taxpayers. In this day of bailouts and boondoggles at taxpayer expense, citizens footing the bills have a right to expect that any company getting government business pays its workers fairly. And there will be technical assistance and reasonable exceptions for small business.
By doing internal pay equity analyses, companies that have a problem and don't know it will be able to find out and fix it before they get hauled into court for discrimination. And if they're not doing anything wrong, they ought to be proud of it and willing to tell the world. Sure would cut down on all those "frivolous lawsuits" if employees could see the statistics up front and know they weren't being shorted in the pay envelope.
Congress did the right thing by bringing us back to a 40 year old standard when it fixed Ledbetter. But the State of New Mexico is way ahead of the curve, looking forward, not backward. Women should challenge the other 49 governors to follow suit, particularly one self-described "feminist" who can see Russia from her house.
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Lilly Ledbetter Act: Obama Signs His First Bill (VIDEO)
President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Act, the first he signed as president. Ledbetter, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and First Lady Michelle Obama were all present....
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Equal Pay For Equal Work: The Moment For Women Is Now
If Joe the Plumber had his moment of fame allegedly representing the average working guy, Lily Ledbetter is going to go down in the history books as the woman who changed the lives of working women.
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Equal Pay for Equal Work -- It's About Time!
Tomorrow, the first bill that our new president will sign into law will be equal pay for equal work. How proud President Obama must be.
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The Horror, The Horror!: GOP, Business Alarmed by Fair Pay Bills
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Standing with the President on the the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act
I was so proud and honored to stand with my colleagues beside the president this morning as he put pen to paper, signed his name, and enacted the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.
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Lilly Ledbetter's Courageous Acts Pump Up Your Pocketbook
Hey, women: want to earn a cool half million? That's about what the average woman loses over a career lifetime due to gender inequities in pay for the same jobs as men.
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The SCOTUS found that Ms. Ledbetter WAS discriminated against, but they found that the 180 day limit on filing applied to when the discrimination STARTED, not when you found out about it.
In other words, you and I start work at the same company at the same time, but they give me $10,000 more per year because I'm a white male, and you're, for example, a black female. You had less than 6 full months to file a complaint or else refuse your rights to a fair paycheck. Under the new law that erroneous interpretation by the SCOTUS is gone, and you now have six months from when you were last discriminated against to file a complaint.
a href="http://urbzen.com/2009/01/29/lilly-ledbetter-and-the-tough-girl’s-guide-to-negotiation/
For a black woman it is 67 cents; for a Latina woman it is 58 cents.
I never see that statistic.
When you compare groups that work in similar ways, factoring in things like full-time/part-time, number of hours worked, etc., you find that women earn only slightly less than men.
Now, none of that has anything to do with the need for the Ledbetter Law and New Mexico's ground-breaking push to have transparency in pay. I personally feel that any employee at any job should be able to go to HR and get a look at the payroll list. It should be scrubbed of personal information, but a person should be able to see what the pay is for everybody who, say, has worked at the company for four years or has a certain job title. Individuals are not groups. No matter how good the group is doing, we need to make sure the individuals are doing just as well.
However, "77 cents" completely distorts what's going on. If you want it to be a dollar for every dollar, we need to examine why women don't work like men.
What exactly is New Mexico going to do if the electric company there decides they aren't going to play ball and shut off the juice to the capital building and all state and city govt buildings? What are they going to do if the major airlines decide they won't play ball and end all air traffic in the state or just prohibit any state or local govt employee from traveling on govt business?
This is why I am proud of my governor Bill Richardson, and was so disappointed to see him drop out of consideration for Commerce Secretary.
(And before anyone else says it, I will repeat the standard joke that NM weathers recessions because we're always in a recession. There's long been some truth to that, but this time it feels different).
inferior and accept whatever someone wants to give them? As far as profit margins, well, get rid of the overpaid men and that ought to fix the problem. Balancing the books on the backs of those who do not make much money is just plain stupid and unrealistic.
The electric company NEEDS the state and its millions or billions to survive. Their "playing ball" is just part of the business plan. Like giving executives who do very little, a bonas. Compeech?
First conservatives bashed welfare, to disenfranchise the poor, unemployed, and disabled. Now conservatives are bashing employment regulation to disenfranchise working American citizens. They have taken an axe to anti-trust and financial regulation and disenfranchised many small business owners, but still have the gall to claim to advocate for small business.
It is the government's job to guarantee and protect the Constitutional rights of its citizens and the personal liberties of its citizens. The biggest threat to individual liberty, at this moment in history, is unrestrained corporate power run rampant. It is a bigger threat to national security and human rights than global Communism or global Jihadism, because it doesn't recognize national boundaries.
You must have never met an attorney in your life.
This report will be all that is needed to gurantee the company is hauled into court.
After all, it is a well-known fact among sociologists and those specializing in anti-poverty measures that women tend to spend a much greater percentage of their income ---such that it is----on caring for their families than do men. In fact, non-governmental global anti-poverty relief organizations now routinely build entire giving campaigns around empowering Third World women, and it's not because these orgs are champions of feminist rights. They know that when women obtain wealth and control, CHILDREN and FAMILIES (including husbands and sons) and entire communities are fed and clothed. When men have resource control, they use the wealth for entertaining themselves. In other words, drinking, drugging, gambling, whoring around, fighting, and making war.
So, kudos to the Obama Administration for this bit of economic stimulus!!!!!!!!
What's to keep a private company from reporting that they pay everyone the same, then, in reality, pay differant wages for the same work? Unless the State is going to totally crawl up the backside of every private firm they do business with, they won't know who gets paid what.
I do think that engineering and science is improving for women as the next generation graduates from college. Those discriminatory and sexist old goats are dying off and about time.