KENNEDY IN SUPPORT OF THE FAIR PAY RESTORATION ACT
Earlier this month, we honored the 40th anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King. Each year on this anniversary we get together and speak glowingly of Dr. King’s life and work. These words are important – make no mistake. But even more important than honoring Dr. King with words, is honoring Dr. King with action. Today, we have the opportunity to do that by passing the Fair Pay Restoration Act. The right to equal pay for equal work is a fundamental civil right. Indeed, Dr. King was in Memphis on that fateful day in April 1968 to protest pay discrimination against black Memphis sanitation workers.
40 years later, we are still fighting the same fight as Dr. King. We are still trying to empower workers to assert their civil rights. Over the years, I have been proud to stand with a majority of the Congress for justice and fairness by passing strong, bipartisan laws against pay discrimination. In 1963, we passed the Equal Pay Act. We followed that in 1964 with the landmark Civil Rights Act, then the Age Discrimination Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and, most recently, the Civil Rights Act of 1991. All these laws protect workers from pay discrimination and have made our country a stronger, better, and fairer land.
These laws are just words on the page of a law book if workers can’t get into court when their employers break the law. To bring these words to life, we must today continue the work that Dr. King started. This effort is necessary because last May the Supreme Court undermined the fundamental protections against pay discrimination. In the Ledbetter decision, the Court imposed serious obstacles in the path of workers seeking to enforce their rights.
Ledbetter was a textbook case of pay discrimination. Lilly Ledbetter, whom I have had the honor to meet, was one of a few women supervisors at a Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company plant in Gadsen, Alabama. She worked at the plant for almost two decades, consistently demonstrating that a woman can do a job traditionally done by men. She put up with teasing and taunting from her male coworkers, but she persevered, and consistently gave the company a fair day’s work for what she thought was a fair day’s pay. What she didn’t know, however, was that Goodyear wasn’t living up to its end of the bargain. For almost two decades, the company used discriminatory evaluations to pay her less than her male colleagues who performed the same work.
The jury saw the injustice in Goodyear’s treatment of Ms. Ledbetter, and awarded her full damages. But five members of the Supreme Court ignored that injustice and held that Ms. Ledbetter was entitled to nothing at all, saying she was too late in filing her claim.
Under the rule in the Ledbetter case, Ms. Ledbetter would have had to file her claim within a few months of when Goodyear first started discriminating against her. Never mind that Ms. Ledbetter didn’t know about the discrimination when it first began. Never mind that she had no means to learn of the discrimination because Goodyear kept salary information confidential. Never mind that Goodyear’s discrimination against Ms. Ledbetter continued each and every time it gave her a smaller paycheck than it gave her male colleagues.
The rule imposed by the Supreme Court reversed decades of precedent in the courts of appeals. It overturned the policy of the EEOC under both Democratic and Republican administration. And it upset the nation’s accepted definition of what is fair and right.
The Court’s decision pulled the turned back the clock on civil rights. Every year, thousands of workers suffer pay discrimination. The Ledbetter decision will hurt workers alleging discrimination of every kind – sex, race, national origin, age, religion, and disability.
The Supreme Court’s decision in Ledbetter gives employers free rein to continue to discriminate and leaves workers powerless to stop it. This result defies both justice and common sense. We must act to restore decency and fairness to our nation’s civil rights laws.
The bipartisan Fair Pay Restoration Act will restore the clear intent of Congress. It provides a reasonable rule that reflects how pay discrimination actually occurs in the workplace. It links the time for filing a pay discrimination claim to the date a worker receives a discriminatory pay check, not when an employer makes a discriminatory decision. Workers shouldn’t have to be mind readers in order to protect themselves from discrimination. Workers who aren’t allowed to share information about their wages shouldn’t be rendered powerless to combat discrimination. This bill recognizes that workers who receive a discriminatory check today should not be out of time to file a claim, simply because the employer managed to hide its illegal behavior initially.
This legislation holds no surprises. It puts the law back to what it was on the day before the Supreme Court’s Ledbetter decision. So, we know that this legislation is fair and workable. There won’t be any unexpected consequences. Courts won’t be overwhelmed. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office has said that this bill won’t increase litigation costs by much. And businesses won’t be blind-sided.
Most importantly, the Fair Pay Restoration Act makes employers accountable for violating the law. Under the Supreme Court’s rule, if an employer can keep its discriminatory ways secret for 6 months, it gets a free pass. It can continue to discriminate and its victims are powerless to stop the unfair treatment. It only makes sense – if the violation continues, the right to challenge it should continue too. No one should get a free pass to break the law.
The Supreme Court’s decision in Ledbetter took us backwards in time. It takes us farther away from our ideal of a fair and just workplace for all Americans. We have too much progress still to make – we can’t afford a step back. With this legislation, we can at least make up the ground that we have lost.
That’s why this legislation has such widespread support. Civil rights groups, labor unions, disability advocates, and religious groups all support this legislation. Many businesses also support the bill, including the U.S. Women’s Chamber of Commerce. All companies that play by the rules and treat their workers fairly should support this legislation.
Workers have lived for almost a year with the inequity of the Ledbetter decision. It is time to stand up for the right to fair pay.
As Dr. King said so eloquently after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964:
Many people felt that after the passage of the civil rights bill, we had accomplished everything. We didn’t have anything else to do and we would miraculously move into a new era of freedom.
But when we opened our eyes, we came to see that the civil rights bill as marvelous as it is, is only the beginning of a new day and not the end of a journey.
If this bill is not implemented in all of its dimensions, it will mean nothing, and all of its eloquent words will be as sounding brass on a tinkling cymbal. We must take this bill and lift if from thin paper to thick action, and go all out, all over this nation, to implement it.
It is time to hold employers accountable for their unlawful conduct. It is time to turn the clock forward on civil rights, instead of backwards. It is time to pass the Fair Pay Restoration Act.
