Well, too bad. Yup, you heard me. You now have no recourse. Because the Supreme Court, on May 29, 2007, issued a narrow 5-4 conservative majority shielding employers from liability unless an employee learns of the pay discrimination (oh so unlikely) and does something about it within 180 days.
The ruling says that the clock for the statute of limitations on wage discrimination begins running when the employer first makes the decision to discriminate, and does not run for all the subsequent months or years that the disparate paychecks are mailed. So, in other words, if you didn’t know when you were hired, and for the next 180 days, that you are being discriminated against, you are screwed. And let’s face it, how many of us are going to have the balls to start asking our co-workers who do the same job, when we are new on the job, if they earn more than us?
That’s how the justice system works under a republican government. Why do I say that? Well, I say that because senate republicans just blocked a bill that would have overturned the Supreme Court’s ruling (the supreme court which of course is staffed by Bush puppets at the moment). The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, already passed by the House, would have reinstated the law as it was interpreted by most appellate courts and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, in other words that every single discriminatory paycheck represents a new act of discrimination and that the 180-day period begins anew with every one.
As it stands now, unless you know when you are first hired that you are earning less than your male counterparts, well, that’s just your tough luck. And this, apparently, was done to “protect” us women - read “stupid women”(how fricking condescending can the republicans be???)—from the greedy clutches of unprincipled plaintiffs’ attorneys and from women’s own stupid inclination to sit around for years—decades even—while being screwed over financially before they bring suit. That means they were, in effect, just protecting us from the dangerous laws that protect us. Well, ain’t that just nice and purdy. Thank you Mr. Republican Senator for saving little ol’ me from myself and from my obtaining justice, little ol’ me being nuttin’ but a woman wouldn’t know nothing about such complicated matters. @@
The time to be heard is now. Write to members of this Committee and your Senator to ask her (or him) to correct the inequity of the Ledbetter decision. And sign the petition at www.momsrising.org in support of this law.
President George W. Bush plans to veto the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay. Let your Senator know that we won’t rest our case until such time as our anti-discrimination laws live up to the original intent of expanding opportunity.
People, we simply HAVE to vote in a democratic, humanitarian, non-dictatorial, intelligence-based government this next time around.
