Many Fair Pay Acts
When I wrote my long, meandering post about the history of Fair Pay and comparable worth as concepts and policy programs, I wrote about a bill – called the Fair Pay Act – that had been proposed in April of 2007 that was the closest thing we have to a modern comparable worth proposal. Although it doesn’t mandate the beaurcatization of the labor market based on governmental evaluations of how much each occupation is “worth,” it would still allow class action lawsuits against employers who were accused of “pay discrimination” based on gender, sex, national origin or ethnicity between occupations. So if employees in predominately female line of work, say nursing assistants in a hospital, were being paid less than plumbers in that same hospital, the nursing assistants could file a class action suit alleges pay discrimination.
What got me confused was the recent flurry of attention surrounding a new Fair Pay Act. This Fair Pay Act, originally called the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, is much more limited in scope. It merely seeks to clarify Title VII of the Civil Rights Act to say that everytime a “discriminatory paycheck” is issued, it gives grounds for an employee to sue her employer for pay discrimination. In Ledbetter v Goodyear, the court ruled that Lily Ledbetter should have sued Goodyear Tires within 180 days of the initial paycheck that reflected discrimination. But because a) employees tend not to talk about their compensation and b) because, in Ledbetter’s case, the discrimination only became obvious when a pattern of not getting raises or promotions emerged over many years, the extremely narrow time horizon for filing a suit makes no sense, if you actually want to do anything about pay discrimination.
So let me be very clear: I support the bill that is up for a vote ( and will likely fail) in the Senate today. I do not support the original Fair Pay Act. Since they’re both called the “Fair Pay Act,” I will refer to the more recent one as the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, or the Ledbetter Act for short.
