I have a different take on this than Hilzoy does.
First the meat of it:
“Senate Republicans on Wednesday blocked a measure intended to overturn a Supreme Court decision limiting pay discrimination suits in a politically charged vote certain to be replayed in the presidential and Congressional campaigns.
By a vote of 56 to 42, the Senate fell four votes short of the 60 required to begin consideration of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, named for an Alabama woman who lost a case against the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company when the court found she not did file her complaint in time. Ms. Ledbetter had been paid as much as 40 percent less than her male counterparts doing the same job, according to her allies.”
The premise is that people should receive equal pay for equal work. Sounds fair, but what if you are willing to work for less money than others? Should you be able to ’sell’ your economic advantage to win a job? Isn’t that what fair markets are about? Isn’t that exactly how an average wage is established?
Yes, I know that large corporations have come up with some high-priced ‘Chilton’s’ manual of what people should be paid for the jobs they hold. But doesn’t that take away a person’s ability to negotiate for a job? Example: A small IT department of 6 people has more work than it can handle. They could use one more, so they interview. One candidate is 25 years old with a young family and is fresh out of school, another candidate is 60 years old and saw his retirement portfolio drop to the point he had to go back to work, and a third candidate has teenagers preparing for college. Because of the nature of the work, the experience of the 60 year old is not an advantage over the 25 year old’s recent education. And the third candidate has no stellar accomplishments that make you think he can advance beyond the station he will be hired for, yet he can do the job.
Is it permissible to offer the young 25 year old or the 60 year old a salary less than what is currently being paid to the 6 IT people on staff? I would say yes. If a company can find a person willing to work for less money, why can they not hire that person? Why should they worry about the gender, or the age, or the pay levels of fellow employees?
Is it permissible for the interviewee to ask for less money than what others make to fulfill an economic need for themselves? I think so.
As for the Supreme Court declaring that one must file suit within 180 days of the beginning of a illegal employee practice, well, that is simply silly. There is nothing Supreme about that decision. Solomon, the Wise, they are not. However, one does not need to be a psychic to also know that Lily Ledbetter did not work in a vacuum and that over the course of years she did know that she was being paid less. We all like to think that wages are confidential but there is always one person who is so disenchanted with their pay ( or so thrilled about it) they just have to tell somebody. That is real life. For me to believe that Lily worked her whole life at one place and did not know she was making less than others is hard to believe. Somebody else knew how much she was making, didn’t they? How else to explain her anonymous note?
I could not determine from what I read whether this was a systemic problem of Goodyear discrimination at this plant, under onemanager, or in the entire company. Were there other women also being discriminated against? Is it reasonable to think that multiple managers of hers (and multiple HR managers) all were conspiring to put their foot on the throat of one Lily Ledbetter? Unfortunately, there is not enough information to know what the conditions were from this article. I would say this: If a plant has 1,000 employees and there is one example of an employee being paid less than his/her colleagues, I don’t know that I would say that discrimination has taken place. I would want to know the particulars.
I am sorry that Lily Ledbetter was paid 25% less than her colleagues. Why is that discrimination though? If her colleagues had all been women and she was still paid 25% less is there some other discrimination that could have been charged?
5 responses so far ↓
The Overlooked Explosive News Story « Just Above Sunset // April 25, 2008 at 11:04 pm
[...] are dissenting views, like this at Reasonable [...]
Anonymous // April 27, 2008 at 8:26 pm
I would agree with you that individuals have the right to negotiate wages that might be lower than those generally given. However, the issue here seems to be about systematic discrimination, where one of the parties (Ledbetter) has little or no power of negotiation, period. From my understanding, there were very few female managers at the Goodyear plant; Washington Post claims that she was in fact the only one. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/29/AR2007052900740.html
She does not seem to have been in a position to negotiate.
ReasonableCitizen // April 28, 2008 at 7:17 am
Thanks for the link.
For me, when there is only one woman supervisor in 19 years, perhaps, the discrimination is in the hiring practices and not the wages.
I don’t know Ms Ledbetter but here are some real world reasons why an employee may earn less than his/her colleagues:
1. meets overall minimum requirements to keep job and others exceed minmums.
2. As supervisor of the work crew, the work crew complains habitually that the supervisor fails to provide clear direction or gives multiple directions for work to be performed.
3. The supervisor’s results consistently disappoint the manager and the manager is fearful of a discrimination lawsuit if employee is dismissed for failure to perform.
4. The marginal performance meets minimums but the absentee rate is higher than others.
5. The employee performance is substandard but the company management has a soft heart for the circumstances of the employee. The company retains the person at a rate less than colleagues but still at a pay-for-performance rate.
Again, however, there is no law that says people must be paid the same money for the same work. The burden is to demonstrate that discrimination has occurred. How can one prove on the basis of one claim by the only woman supervisor (who continued to work there for 19 years) that discrimination occurred?
I would also point out that plenty of companies retain ‘marginal’ people at lower rates because of their fear of lawsuits.
If you think that is untrue, then you have not worked under the fear of firing the only black worker in your company during the 1970’s and 1980’s. Today things are different, bad black workers and bad white workers are let go everyday for non-performance but that is not the way it once was.
Today people are hired and fired for their work experience and job performance in mainstream America.
But there continue to be reasons why ‘marginal’ employees are retained. Today we might add age discrimination to the issues. When Baby Boomers intermittently have absenteeism, forgetfulness, failure to perfom, medication-induced errors, and only the Lord knows what else, what steps will companies take to shed themselves of ‘marginal’ employees? Shall they raise standards and then document the failures of marginal employees until they are fired for poor performance? Should they shift all of the marginal employees to a new department and then dissolve the new department 6 months later? Or perhaps they should lower the standards and turn all marginal employees into successes and shift all over-qualified employees to new departments? Would the employees receive lower wages as a result of lowered expectations?
I don’t have any answers to these questions. I only raise them because some employees ought to be paid less than others because they lack the same amounts of the three things that make a good employee: good work output, low absenteeism, and good relationships with co-workers.
Reta Tallman // April 30, 2008 at 4:42 pm
In her column this morning Susan Estrich has jumped on the bandwagon crying ‘unfair, unfair, discrimination of women’ charging both Goodyear and the court with bias. She even smites John McCain threatening him that women won’t vote for him now because he didn’t attend the voting on the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. Enough women will think Ms Estrich is spot on about this and – even though any dyed-in-the-wool (so-called) liberated American woman wouldn’t be caught dead voting for him anyway – those who are politically naive could be persuaded by her rhetoric. Too bad being liberated has to correlate to being blind to true justice. I think the court decided just fine.
ReasonableCitizen // April 30, 2008 at 8:26 pm
I think the lower courts had it all wrong. I have not sat down to do the math but if anyone receives the lowest possible raise each time and this occurs for 19 years I am not surprised that there is a $15,000 difference.
But the fact that there is a difference cannot be attributed to gender discrimination when there is only one woman supervisor.