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May 28, 2009 in City
Ledbetter preaches equal pay in lecture at EWU
Lilly Ledbetter gathers her thoughts prior to talking to an audience Wednesday at Eastern Washington University.
(Full-size photo)
Lilly Ledbetter never expected to have a law named after her.
But then, the former line manager at the Goodyear Tire plant in Gadsden, Ala., never thought the company had been paying her lower wages than other line managers who were men.
And who could have predicted that the U.S. Supreme Court would eviscerate equal-pay provisions of the Civil Rights Act by overturning her lawsuit in Ledbetter v. Good-year?
The 71-year-old activist spoke Wednesday to nearly 300 people at Eastern Washington University in Cheney.
“It’s not just the Lilly Ledbetter story,” she said. “It does not belong to Democrats or Republicans. This is a civil rights matter.”
Nevertheless, it took a Democrat-controlled Congress to pass the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which was the first act of Congress signed by President Barack Obama when he assumed office.
When Ledbetter was tipped by an anonymous fellow worker that she had been underpaid for nearly 20 years, she filed an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint against Goodyear and eventually won a hard-fought case in U.S. District Court before it was overturned by the Supreme Court.
The justices ruled 5-4 that the statute of limitations for her equal-pay complaint ran out six months after she took the job.
When she found out her pay was lower than that of her co-workers, she said, “I thought about just moving on. But I just couldn’t let Goodyear get away with it.”
And after the high court decision, Ledbetter said, she was inspired to carry on her fight by the dissenting opinion of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who strongly urged Congress to right a wrong.
Ledbetter became a champion of a bill passed by Congress in 2008. It resets the statute of limitations on equal-pay claims to six months from the date of any paycheck that reflects discriminatory pay.
“We cannot stop there,” Ledbetter said. “Discrimination still exists.”
She urged the crowd at EWU to support the Paycheck Fairness Act to allow full compensation for wage discrimination. The measure has passed the House of Representatives and awaits a vote of the Senate.
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Despite women’s 40-year-old demand for equal wages, millions of women as wives still choose to have no wages at all. In fact, according to Dr. Scott Haltzman, author of The Secrets of Happily Married Women, stay-at-home wives, including those who are childless, constitute a growing niche. “In the past few years,” he says in a CNN August 2008 report at http://tinyurl.com/6reowj, “many women who are well educated and trained for career tracks have decided instead to stay at home.” (“Census Bureau data show that 5.6 million mothers stayed home with their children in 2005, about 1.2 million more than did so a decade earlier….” at http://tinyurl.com/qqkaka.)
As full-time mothers or homemakers, these women earn zero wages. How can they afford to do this while in many cases living lives of luxury in big homes in affluent neighborhoods? Virtually any teen-ager knows the answer: “Duh-uh! They are supported by their husband.”
So if millions of wives can work for zero wages, millions of other wives can work for low wages in full-time or part-time work, can refuse to work overtime, can refuse promotions, can take more unpaid days off … all because their husbands are willing to support them.
What about single women who hope to marry? Most are keenly aware of men’s extant general willingness to sooner or later economically support the woman they marry. Thus countless numbers of these women configure their jobs, careers, and aspirations accordingly. Many hope to marry — and actively look for — a man who earns enough to offer them the three options cited by Warren Farrell in his book Why Men Earn More: work full-time, work part-time, or work full-time as a housewife. These women often regard a husband as their primary employer. In return for their husband’s media-unappreciated generosity, these women plan to offer him three slightly different options: work full-time, work full-time, work full-time with overtime when the wife departs from the workforce, nearly always at a time of her choosing.
Men’s willingness to support their wives is the true, unacknowledged cause of the sexes’ infamous (to ideological feminists and the mainstream media) gender wage gap, women’s 77 cents to men’s dollar.
To many people, the current legislation aimed at closing the gender wage gap soon begins to look absurd. But if you want to pass absurd legislation that would really work, would indeed close the gender wage gap — almost overnight — pass a law that prohibits men from supporting women.
Think about it. If men were prohibited from supporting women, every unemployed wife in the country would be forced to get a job. And millions of employed women would be forced to obtain a better one, raising women’s average pay immediately and dramatically. “Without husbands,” says Warren Farrell, author of Why Men Earn More, “women have to focus on earning more. They work longer hours, they’re willing to relocate and they’re more likely to choose higher-paying fields like technology.”
And how would this prohibition effect men? Millions would no longer feel the need for a high-paying job to attract women and gain and hold a woman’s love. A good number of the men already holding a high-paying and likely stressful job would gleefully walk away, sending employers into a frenzy recruiting women.
Men wouldn’t have to earn as much, and women would have to earn more. Presto — the sexes’ wage gap would snap shut with a thunderous clap. An ideological feminist fantasy come true!
From “A Male Matters Response to the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act” at http://tinyurl.com/pvbrcu:
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