The pity is that she had to resort to these measures, with the absurdity that the U.S. Supreme Court has morphed into.
I'll join with Justice Ginsberg, in the hope that a Democratic Congress will rectify this LEGISLATING FROM THE BENCH by the justices on the far right. (Oh, Sandra Day O'Connor, we miss you!)
And WHY was the Bush administration filing this case on Goodyear's behalf? More corporate welfare subsidies, because Goodyear can't afford to pay their own lawyers? Does this one rank right up there with a corrupt Department of Justice reducing the damages on that big tobacco judgment that was already in the bag, taking the damages down from $100 millions to the $10 millions?
Way to add to the credibility of the (in)Justice Department! Woo woo!
Here's just a few bits about today's decision.
Link: Supreme Court Limits Discrimination Suits - New York Times.
Supreme Court Limits Discrimination Suits
WASHINGTON, May 29 — The Supreme Court ruled today, in a case of considerable interest to business and industry, that employers should be protected from lawsuits over pay discrimination linked to gender or race and based on decisions made or acts committed years ago.
Voting 5 to 4 after apparently heated deliberations, the justices found in favor of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company and against Lilly M. Ledbetter, who worked for 19 years at the company’s plant in Gadsden, Ala., and was paid substantially less than men doing work at the same level.
The majority found against Ms. Ledbetter, saying she could not show that there had been intentional discrimination in the 180-day period before she complained to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in March 1998, shortly after she retired following an unwanted transfer. Goodyear’s argument that federal law protected the company from claims concerning discrimination that occurred before Sept. 26, 1997 — or 180 days before Ms. Ledbetter filed her E.E.O.C. action — was upheld.
[...]
The Bush administration had entered the case on Goodyear’s behalf. The case, Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, No. 05-1074, was argued on Nov. 27. Neal D. Mollen, an employment-law attorney in Washington who filed a brief backing Goodyear on behalf of the United States Chamber of Commerce, told Bloomberg News that today’s ruling has “great importance for employers.”
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg read part of her dissent aloud (itself an unmistakable sign of anger), and the tone of her opinion showed how bitterly she differed with the majority. She asserted that the effects of pay discrimination can be relatively small at first, then become far more serious as subsequent raises are based on the original low pay, and that instances of pay inequities ought to be treated differently from other acts of discrimination. For one thing, she said, pay discrimination is often not uncovered until long after the fact.
The majority’s holding, she said, “is totally at odds with the robust protection against workplace discrimination Congress intended Title VII to secure.” She said the majority “does not comprehend, or is indifferent to, the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination.”
“This is not the first time the Court has ordered a cramped interpretation of Title VII, incompatible with the statute’s broad remedial purpose,” she wrote. Her dissent was joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter and Stephen G. Breyer.
“Once again, the ball is in Congress’s court,” Justice Ginsburg wrote, expressing the hope that the lawmakers “may act to correct this parsimonious reading of Title VII.”
Recent Comments