Back in August of last year, while I was blogging from the Democratic convention, I told you about Lilly Ledbetter, whose fight for equal pay to her male colleagues had been rejected by the Supreme Court on a technicality:
Lilly Ledbetter had worked for nearly two decades at a Goodyear Tire plant in Gadsden, Alabama when she discovered that for years male co-workers doing the same job as her had been paid more. She filed suit and won, but Goodyear appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled — by one vote — to dismiss her suit on the grounds that the pay discrimination had happened more than 180 days before the suit was filed.
Lilly’s struggle to win equal pay for equal work led progressives in Congress to introduce the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which would have removed the 180-days rule, but while it passed in the House conservatives in the Senate have so far successfully prevented it from passing that chamber.
Well, we now have a new Congress and a new President, and they acted swiftly to ensure that the Ledbetter Act didn’t suffer the same fate this time that it did in the last Congress. Today, President Barack Obama signed it into law — making it the first bill to receive the new President’s signature.
At the signing ceremony, President Obama reflected on the meaning of Ledbetter’s struggle:
Lilly knows that this story isn’t just about her. It’s the story of women across this country still earning just 78 cents for every dollar men earn — women of color even less — which means that today, in the year 2009, countless women are still losing thousands of dollars in salary, income and retirement savings over the course of a lifetime.
Equal pay is by no means just a women’s issue — it’s a family issue. It’s about parents who find themselves with less money for tuition and child care; couples who wind up with less to retire on; households where one breadwinner is paid less than she deserves; that’s the difference between affording the mortgage — or not; between keeping the heat on, or paying the doctor bills — or not. And in this economy, when so many folks are already working harder for less and struggling to get by, the last thing they can afford is losing part of each month’s paycheck to simple and plain discrimination.
So signing this bill today is to send a clear message: that making our economy work means making sure it works for everybody; that there are no second-class citizens in our workplaces; and that it’s not just unfair and illegal, it’s bad for business to pay somebody less because of their gender or their age or their race or their ethnicity, religion or disability; and that justice isn’t about some abstract legal theory, or footnote in a casebook. It’s about how our laws affect the daily lives and the daily realities of people: their ability to make a living and care for their families and achieve their goals.
Comments (1)
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This is long overdue, but I'm not sure it's going to make much of a difference. As a society we need to start raising our daughters to ASK for what they want rather than politely waiting for someone to notice them.
Posted by StephanieInCA on January 29, 2009 at 6:09 PM
Posted on January 29, 2009 at 6:09 PM