Date: 2009-01-09
Speaker: GEORGE MILLER (democrat)
Chamber: H
State: California

Madam Speaker. I yield myself 5 minutes. Madam Speaker. the 2007 Ledbetter v. Goodyear Supreme Court ruling was a painful step backwards in the civil rights in this country. Today. the House will vote once again to say that the ruling is unacceptable and must not stand. Nondiscrimination in the workplace is a sacred American principle. Workers should be paid based upon their merits and their responsibilities. not on the employers prejudices. Yet. more than 40 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. the Supreme Court decided to dramatically turn back the clock. Lilly Ledbetter worked for Goodyear for nearly two decades. Just as she was retiring as supervisor in 1998. she found out that her salary was 20 percent. 20 percent lower than that of the lowest paid male supervisor. Not only was Ms. Ledbetter earning nearly $400 a month less per month than her male colleagues. she also retired with substantially smaller pension and Social Security benefits. A jury found that Goodyear in fact had discriminated against Ms. Ledbetter because she was a woman. She was awarded $3.8 million in back pay and damages. This amount was reduced to $360.000 because of the damage gap of title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Despite the fact that the jury found Goodyear gui lty of discrimination. a sharply divided Supreme Court in a 54 opinion decided that while Goodyear discriminated against Ms. Ledbetter. her claim was made too late. They had discriminated against her. but she was too late in making her claim. Why was she too late? Because they said that she had filed outside the 180 day statute -of limitations because she did not file after they had taken their secret executive action to pay Ms. Ledbetter less than her male counterparts. The fact of the matter is. she did not know that all of the time that she was working because of the secrecy of that act. The practical result. the practical result of the decision by this court. would be that as long as they could continue to hide the act. if they could get past 180 days. Ms. Ledbetter could be discriminated against and she would not be able to recover anything. The law has said for a very long time that when a decision was made which was discriminatory in its nature. every paycheck issued since that time was a continuation of the original discriminatory act and Ms. Ledbetter had 180 days and other plaintiffs had 180 days to file from the last paycheck that was issued. Ms. Ledbetter did that. but the Supreme Court saw otherwise. So. what the Supreme Court is saying is that employers would be allowed to continue to discriminate against employees without any consequences .if they could hide it for 180 days. That is simply unacceptable in the American workplace. it is unacceptable to women in this country. and it is important that we pass the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. which would reset the law as businesses and most courts and employees and the EEOC had understood it to be before the courts dramatic ruling. Under H.R. 11. every paycheck or other compensation resulting in whole or in part from an early discriminatory pay decision or other practice would continue as a violation of title VII. That is as it should be. That is as it was before the court spoke. In other words. each discriminatory paycheck would restart the clock for filing a charge. As long as workers filed their charges. as Ms. Ledbetter herself did. within 180 days of the discriminatory paycheck. their charges could be considered as timely. No worker should have to put a full days work in and get a paycheck at the end of the week that is based upon their gender. race or religion. without any recourse to justice. That is what this legislation will stop. It is fundamental and it is important. This legislation also ensures that these simple reforms extend to the Age biscrimination in Employment Act. the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act to provide these same protections for victims of age and disability discrimination. Connecting pay discrimination poses significant challenges to workers. made all the harder by the Supreme Courts Ledbetter decision. The reality is that most workers dont know what their coworkers are making. Employers often prohibit employees from discussing their pay with each other. We fix these problems also with the passage of the Paycheck Fairness Act. The courts misguided decision is already having very harmful consequences far beyond Ms. Ledbetters case. According to The New York Times. the Ledbetter decision has been cited in over 300 cases in the last 19 months that have denied people the opportunity to provide for recovery. In this economy. especially in this economy. when every dollar counts to every worker in this country. to provide for themselves or their families. to provide for the wherewithal to go through the daily life in America. we cannot have people discriminated against because of their gender. We can pass the Lilly Ledbetter Pay Act. and that will end that practice in the American workplace.