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Who needs Fair Pay?

(posted by Paige)

Last week, Senate Republicans blocked a bill that would have enabled women to more effectively sue employers over gender based wage discrimination. The bill was intended to overturn the Supreme Court’s 2007 ruling in Ledbetter v. Goodyear , which limited the ability of workers to seek legal recourse under Title VII by enforcing a statute of limitations of 180 days from the first instance of wage discrimination (despite the fact that this type of discrimination is often as subtle as it is insidious and therefore can take much longer to uncover). John McCain was absent on voting day, but made clear through comments that he opposed the bill. Times op-ed columnist Gail Collins had this to say about the bill, the vote, and the absent McCain’s stance in the debate:

Lilly Ledbetter was a supervisor at a Goodyear Tire plant in Gadsden, Ala., for almost 20 years — the only woman who ever managed to stick it out in what was not exactly a female-friendly environment. 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 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 […] In other words, pay discrimination is illegal unless it goes on for more than six months.

McCain’s vote wouldn’t have made any difference. But his reaction does suggest that on his list of presidential priorities, the problems of working women come in somewhere behind the rising price of after-dinner mints. Having delivered his objections to the Ledbetter bill this week, McCain went on to tell reporters that what women really need is “education and training, particularly since more and more women are heads of their households, as much or more than anybody else. And it’s hard for them to leave their families when they don’t have somebody to take care of them.” Maybe George Bush isn’t all that incoherent after all.

Dahlia Lithwick also expressed her opinion on the Senate’s failure to pass the bill, in her article for Slate entitled “How Dumb Are We? How Long Will Women Shoulder the Blame For the Pay Gap?” Here’s her summary of the arguments offered by senators opposed to the bill:

Many of the Republicans who blocked the vote to reinstate the original reading of Title VII claimed they were doing so to protect women—read “stupid women”—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. Whew.

So, 42 members of the U.S. Senate blocked a bill that would allow victims of gender discrimination to learn of and prove discrimination in those rare cases in which their employers don’t cheerfully discuss it with them at the office Christmas party. And the reasons for blocking it include the fact that women are not smart enough to file timely lawsuits, not smart enough to avoid being manipulated by vile plaintiffs’ lawyers, not smart enough to know when they are being stiffed, and—per John McCain—not well-trained enough in the first place to merit equal pay.

In the words of good old James Brown, “This is a man’s world, but it wouldn’t be nothing without a woman or a girl.” Without us, how would corporations close those budget gaps and still get the job done?

This entry was posted on Monday, April 28th, 2008 at 8:40 am

Categories: Republicans, corporate state, feminism, labor, your friend the state.

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2 Responses to “Who needs Fair Pay?”

Kevin Carson Says:
April 28th, 2008 at 11:45 pm
Ah, the old argument for “education and training.” It’s a fallacy of composition: if everybody gets that magical education and training, we’ll all get to be Pharaoh, and the pyramids will just build themselves.
Paige Says:
April 29th, 2008 at 7:20 am
Except that in this case we aren’t talking about social mobility and how education factors into it. This is a situation in which workers who have the same or better education and training as their colleagues are simply getting paid less on account of their gender. That’s what makes McCain and his buddies’ arguments so inane.

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Who needs Fair Pay?

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