Louise Roth

Originally written May 31, 2007.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court delivered a huge blow to the fight against pay discrimination for women in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., Inc. (See http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/30/washington/30scotus.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin and http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/30/us/30pay.html) In the case, the only woman supervisor at a Goodyear Tire plant in Gadsden, Alabama was paid less than any of her 16 male colleagues, including those with less seniority. She did not learn of the pay discrepancy until late in her 20-year career at Goodyear. But in arguing that pay discrimination cases require a formal complaint to be filed within 180 days after pay is set, the 5-4 decision ignored the fact that most workers have no knowledge of how much their coworkers make. Most employers do not make pay rates public and, in fact, make every effort to conceal salary information. Only state organizations are required to make such information public. Because most employers lack this transparency, the ruling takes all accountability away from employers – and permits them to discriminate with impunity on the basis of sex, race, religion, or national origin.

Patterns of discrimination are often subtle and difficult to discern at the beginning of one’s career. The more that managers have discretion over pay, the more that pay inequities tend to exist. Small inequities at the beginning of workers’ careers tend to grow larger as their careers progress. And workers often don’t know the extent to which they are underpaid relative to their peers because they have no accurate information about other people’s pay. Often it is far longer than 180 days before workers discover that someone else does the same job in the same organization but is paid more than they are – largely because most discrimination is cumulative in nature. I found this on Wall Street when I did my research for Selling Women Short: Gender and Money on Wall Street, and sound social science research on inequality in a wide variety of occupations and fields has shown the same. The ruling Ledbetter v. Goodyear will make this problem worse by shielding employers from challenges to their inequitable pay practices.

The Supreme Court ruling suggests that the Roberts Court is completely out of touch with the realities of pay discrimination, and with how employers set pay rates. This ruling violates the spirit of equal employment opportunity laws and makes these laws impotent. But this is clearly in step with the intentions of the Bush administration, which has already removed data on discrimination from official government websites and publications, and has undermined efforts to continue collecting such data. In addition to the assault on women’s reproductive autonomy, the recent Supreme Court nominees were appointed to sustain a more subtle attack on vulnerable workers. Bush has succeeded in delivering on his promises in this realm, once again undermining justice and the rule of law.