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Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is
By Julie Marsh |
July 8, 2008
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Read more: parental is political, presidential election, lilly ledbetter fair pay act, john mccain
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I worked outside the home for more than ten years - three of those years with a child of my own at home (or, more accurately, in day care). I was an officer in the Air Force, and then I was an IT project manager in the private sector. My resume has length and breadth, and I'm proud of it.
Moms Rising has created a petition in support of the Fair Pay Act - and they're also encouraging women to send their resumes to John McCain. Apparently Sen. McCain was not present to vote on the bill (which did not pass), but he would have voted no anyway. According to a New York Times editorial by Gail Collins: ...if he had been in Washington, he would have voted no because the bill "opens us up for lawsuits, for all kinds of problems and difficulties." The impetus behind the Fair Pay Act is a suit filed by Lilly Ledbetter that went to the Supreme Court: Lilly Ledbetter was a supervisor at a Goodyear Tire plant in Gadsden, Ala., for almost 20 years...When she was near retirement, she got an anonymous letter listing the salaries of the men who held the same job. While she was making $3,727 a month, the lowest paid man, with far less seniority, was getting $4,286.
The company declined Ledbetter’s offer to settle for the difference between her earnings and that lowest-paid man’s — about $60,000. A jury awarded her $223,776 in back pay and more than $3 million in punitive damages.
Goodyear appealed, and the case [went to] the Supreme Court...The court ruled 5-to-4 against Ledbetter, saying that she should have filed her suit within 180 days of receiving her first paycheck in which Goodyear discriminated against her. Unlike my time in the Air Force, where I had a pay scale tacked up in my cubicle and I received the same pay as any other 1st Lieutenant with three years of service, I had no idea what my co-workers were making when I was in the private sector. We didn't talk about it. Salaries in the private sector - even hourly wages - are not typically disclosed in casual conversation, and there's certainly no pay scale to refer to.
In essence, according to the court, Lilly Ledbetter should have been comparing notes with her co-workers for the past twenty years, poised to file a lawsuit in the event that her bi-weekly paycheck differed from that of co-workers in like positions and with comparable seniority.
The Fair Pay Act aims to reset the 180 day time frame each time a paycheck is issued. That is, if a worker realized, a year after being hired, that her paychecks were less than those of her peers, she would have 180 days to file suit from the time that she received a "short" paycheck - even if her paychecks had been "short" during the entire tenure of her employment.
The court's decision stemmed from concerns regarding "the burden of defending claims arising from employment decisions that are long past." That is, if Ledbetter successfully sued her employer for pay discrimination that began years and years ago, many similar cases would likely arise. Hence McCain's objection to the bill.
As anyone who has worked in the private sector can attest, it's downright laughable to think that employees would sit around and compare notes after each paycheck. It's just not done. We're taught as children not to talk about money - how much we make (or our parents make) and how much our possessions cost. It's unreasonable to expect that workers would know how much money each other make, so the 180 day time frame is unrealistic.
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Granted, the Fair Pay Act does open up companies to lawsuits. But shouldn't they have documentation to back up their salary ranges and the raises and bonuses that were awarded? Don't let the name fool you; Human Resources departments exist to look out for the company's interests. It's their job to ensure that such matters can be explained and defended. If an employee's lawsuit has merit - if pay discrimination can be shown to exist, even if it began more than 180 days before the suit was filed - shouldn't it proceed?
Such lawsuits aren't comparable to those being filed against tobacco companies and fast-food purveyors. I agree that nobody forced anybody to smoke unfiltered Camels, scarf down Big Macs, or supervise tire production assembly lines. But the awards in a pay discrimination lawsuit are more easily quantified: What were the other supervisors with similar seniority, qualifications, and job performance making? Do a little simple arithmetic - just as Ledbetter did when she offered to settle - and right these wrongs.
I don't have much sympathy for companies that are paying their workers according to an undocumented and indefensible scale - particularly large companies with the bureaucratic infrastructure of Goodyear. Whether the workers being shorted are men or women is irrelevant to me, even as a woman. Fair Pay means Fair Pay.
Unfortunately, the Fair Pay Act is not limited to resetting the 180 day timeframe for filing suit. Like almost all legislation, it's padded with other provisions that make a yes-no vote much less clear cut. In the case of this bill, "...the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) would create criteria determining whether a given job is dominated by one sex; employers would have to send the EEOC every year a listing of each job classification, the race and sex of those holding such jobs; how much they are paid; and how such pay was determined. The goal of all this is to ensure that people in "equivalent" jobs are paid similar wages." While I am unequivocally in favor of equal pay for equal work, education, and experience, my Libertarian sensibilities balk at the bureaucracy proposed herein.
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| Julie is a former Air Force officer and professional project manager turned web writer. She spent four years at the Pentagon and five years in New York City, and her suburban life in Colorado seems pastoral by comparison. She's no political pundit, but she is a rational thinker determined to chart her own course whether the other parents approve or not. She writes for Cool Mom Picks, The Soccer Mom Vote, mothergoosemouse, and is co-founder of The Parent Bloggers Network. |
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