Supreme Court Moves Backward on Equal Pay

By Liz Gilchrist

May 30, 2007

The Roberts court strikes again. Tuesday's Supreme Court decision in the case of Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. dealt a near-fatal blow to our ability to use Title VII of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 to remedy pay discrimination based on sex, race, national origin, and other protected grounds.

In a 5-4 decision that turns our understanding of employment discrimination on its head, the Court ruled that a Title VII complaint must be filed within 180 days of the specific action that sets discriminatory pay, regardless of its ongoing and continuing discriminatory impact on the employee. As a result, many victims of pay discrimination will be left without an effective remedy, even though their rights have been violated.

Justice Samuel Alito's decision was joined predictably by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Scalia, Thomas and Kennedy. Their majority opinion ignores the realities of the workplace where disparities in pay are often undiscovered or difficult to determine, especially since so many employers keep salary and pay information confidential.

Pay discrimination is often incremental and subtle, as was the case with Lilly Ledbetter, who did receive raises over the course of her 19-year career with Goodyear, but each raise was substantially lower than that of her male counterparts. The cumulative effects of her disparate treatment grew until she was being paid 15%-25% less than her male colleagues, even those with far less experience.

Justice Alito's cramped and narrow interpretation of Title VII is directly contrary to the law's broad remedial purpose of protecting working women and men from discrimination in employment. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg pointed out in her forceful and eloquent dissenting opinion, "the Court ... is totally at odds with the robust protection against workplace discrimination Congress intended Title VII to secure."

Worse yet, despite his repeated avowal of respect for Supreme Court precedent during his confirmation hearings in the Senate just last year, Justice Alito so narrowly restricted the scope of existing pay discrimination precedent in this case as to render it useless for most litigants. Ledbetter's majority opinion effectively overturns 20 years of federal court cases and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission rulings which had consistently ruled that a prohibited act of discrimination occurs each time a woman receives a paycheck that is less than a similarly situated man.

Although it has been rarely commented on, the jury that heard all the facts had awarded Ledbetter three million dollars in damages, but the trial judge cut that amount to only $360,000 because of a limitation that was inserted in the Civil Rights Act of 1991, during the first Bush administration, which put a cap on damages for sex discrimination, regardless of the facts.

Every senator who did not act to prevent Justice Alito's confirmation to the Supreme Court bears some responsibility for this reprehensible roll-back of our ability to get fair treatment in the workplace and in the courts. Replacing Justice Sandra Day O'Connor with Samuel Alito shifted the balance on the court, and women will be paying the price for a long time.