Thank God for Obama & Equal Pay for Women

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Thank God for Obama & Equal Pay for Women

A friend just forwarded me the words Pres. Obama spoke when signing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law yesterday. In case someone has confused you about this issue, (like your Republican representative or senator), the issue is really quite simple: After working for 15 or more years for her employer doing the exact same work as her male co-workers in exactly the same job classification, she accidentally "discovered" that she had been (and was still being) paid almost 40% or so less than the men were.

The Supreme Court ruled that even though the employer had covered up and hidden their discrimination from her for all those years, that she was not entitled to recover the salary difference for all those 15 years, and further that she wasn't even entitled to recover for the year or so prior to her discovering the discrimination and filing a charge with the EEOC. Instead, the Court ruled she was just shit out of luck (SOL) because she waited more than 300 days beyond the date the employer actually made the discriminatory pay decision to file her claim with EEOC (finding it irrelevant that the employer had not disclosed the discrepancy).

The passage & signing of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act rights this terrible injustice. Unfortunately, Ms. Ledbetter still can't recover, but at least all other women now can because of her sacrifice & perseverence. And thank God for President Obama, who said:

"Equal pay is by no means just a women's issue -- it's a family issue. It's about parents who find themselves with less money for tuition and child care; couples who wind up with less to retire on; households where one breadwinner is paid less than she deserves; that's the difference between affording the mortgage -- or not; between keeping the heat on, or paying the doctor bills -- or not. And in this economy, when so many folks are already working harder for less and struggling to get by, the last thing they can afford is losing part of each month's paycheck to simple and plain discrimination.
"So signing this bill today is to send a clear message: that making our economy work means making sure it works for everybody; that there are no second-class citizens in our workplaces; and that it's not just unfair and illegal, it's bad for business to pay somebody less because of their gender or their age or their race or their ethnicity, religion or disability; and that justice isn't about some abstract legal theory, or footnote in a casebook. It's about how our laws affect the daily lives and the daily realities of people: their ability to make a living and care for their families and achieve their goals.
"Ultimately, equal pay isn't just an economic issue for millions of Americans and their families, it's a question of who we are -- and whether we're truly living up to our fundamental ideals; whether we'll do our part, as generations before us, to ensure those words put on paper some 200 years ago really mean something -- to breathe new life into them with a more enlightened understanding that is appropriate for our time."
-- Pres. Barack H. Obama, in remarks at signing ceremony for the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, Jan. 29, 2009

It's still mystifying how President Bush and his Republican colleagues could have opposed this legislation. Thank God that's another wrong the American public has recently righted!

Peace,
Beth Isbell