Why lilly ledbetter act is bad

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Our goals for this space are to be educational, thought-provoking, and respectful. So we actively moderate comments and we reserve the right to edit or remove comments that undermine these goals. The narrow majority rejected her argument that each paycheck she received after the discrimination began was a new violation of law. Historically, a day statute of limitations governed pay discrimination claims. Ledbetter provides that an employee's limitations period for such claims now resets every time the employee is affected by a discriminatory pay practice or decision.

Of course, an employee whose pay is lower as a result of improper discrimination is "affected" by a discriminatory pay practice or decision every time the employee receives an improperly small paycheck. Looking at Ledbetter in this light, one sees how lengthy the limitation period has potentially become.

Ledbetter critics point out that Ledbetter effectively allows employees to challenge pay practices and decisions occurring so far in the past certainly long after any typical statute of limitations would have barred a claim that they cannot be defended fairly and effectively,. By way of example, if Sarah A. Employee claims that, as a result of improper discrimination, she was paid less than a male counterpart one time in the 20th year of her employment, Ledbetter now provides that Sarah can claim that a paycheck she received in her first year of employment and maybe every paycheck thereafter also was improperly small as a result of prohibited discrimination.

The old saying is that "when it rains it pours," and Ledbetter's enactment seemingly drenched the landscape of pay discrimination litigation.

If Ledbetter didn't create a jungle growth of litigation for employers, the Paycheck Fairness Act which was under consideration by the Senate Senate Bill might have finished the job. This week in D. Two new co-sponsors of the Paycheck Fairness Act is a start, and Obama announced at the State of the Union this week that he will use an executive order to raise the minimum wage for workers on new federal contracts.

The way Ledbetter sees it, the president should also use his administrative power to issue an executive order that would protect federal contract workers from retaliation if they discuss salary or wage practices. Ledbetter works with AAUW to champion this executive order because it gets to the heart of her issue — Goodyear is a federal contractor — and because of all the women who have told her their unfair pay stories over the years.

In typical Ledbetter fashion, she has a joke ready for the too-rare occasion when she hears a story about a business putting policies in place to ensure fairness. This good humor and resilience often cause people not to realize that Ledbetter never received a dime of the back pay she was owed by Goodyear. Today, her retirement benefits are 40 percent less than they should be, and she struggles just as many people in this country do.