Comments on Justices Uphold Pay Discrimination
If we haven't got a statute, let's elect some leaders with balls and put it in there!
Ahh....unhappy that all my Bush predictions came true, especially with regard to the Supreme Court Justices who will rule on laws, the effects of which will outlive GW. All goes according to plan. Screw women, minorities, and anyone else who believes the law should apply to everyone equally.
I can't make any sense of this ruling.
They pulled it out of their ass.
That really is crap. Particularly since information such as salary is now being protected even more than it traditionally was, due to privacy concerns.
A side note, but what the fuck is up with Clarence Thomas? Has he ever even expressed an opinion? Is he really as Uncle Tom as he seems?
He seems to love being black when it can get him points (as in his "high tech lynching" bullshit sound byte) but the rest of the time he just wants to get along to go along with whatever his massah' tells him.
Holy crap, that is so freaking unbelievably awful.
ECB, peel your eyes from the eggs Benedict and read the dissent. You have missed the key point.
Ginsburg does not argue (as your toiling women would) that current effects breathe life into prior discrimination. That argument is a recipe for defeat. Instead she argues that each paycheck is its own discriminatory act:
"Our precedent suggests, and lower courts have overwhelmingly held, that the unlawful practice is the current payment of salaries infected by gender-based (or race-based) discrimination—a practice that occurs whenever a paycheck delivers less to a woman than to a similarly situated man."
re: "As usual, Ruth Bader Ginsberg played the voice of sanity, noting that the all-male majority’s ruling..."
What does the majority being male have to do with this?
If maleness had anything to do with the decision, wouldn't it be an 8-1 decision?
Without a factual basis, it's a stereotype, and a divisive one at that. The gender of the Justices clearly has nothing to do with their ruling. To imply that it did seems to verge on sexism.
I'm sad to see the promotion of gender stereotypes in an article about the unfairness of gender discrimination.
Especially because it seems obvious, given the ideological split in the decision, that if Harriet Miers had been appointed to the court, she would have voted the same way Alito did.
And I mean all this in the nicest way possible, because in a culture that promotes so many harmful stereotypes, it seems easy to forget to not use the knee-jerk shorthand that is also used to justify unequal pay for equal work.
Maybe some guys could chime in to let us know how it feels to be told that their gender means that they have no respect for women nor concern for the inequality women endure.
What kind of person could work somewhere for 20 years and have no idea how much her co-workers were making. Obviously she is neither bright nor ambitious. No wonder they got away with paying her less.
Funny story: many years ago I got an email from my boss congratulating me on my raise and formalizing the amount. I was expecting this email since we had talked, but the amount was a bit higher than we had discussed. No complaints, right? Woo hoo! Until I realized she was also congratulating my fine work on a project I hadn't worked on. Hmm. The man who had worked on that project also got a promotion at the same time I did. I had seniority, he got the higher raise. Not necessarily gender discrimination...maybe, maybe not...but her sloppiness with her email template is the only way I ever would have known. This ruling is ridiculous.
Well jeez, if you girls would just work harder...
Seriously, this is horrific. Sanity has brought back the Congress, and will (I hope) come back to the White House--but this entrenched, small-mindedness in the Supreme Court promises to go on for a generation.
I believe that the Constitution states that after 180 days, your rights are negotiable. I think that might also be in the Civil Rights Act. Long live strict scrutiny!
I blame Sandra Day O'Connor. Without Bush v. Gore we never would have had Alito on the court.
And for those of us who may have missed the clue train, salaries are generally not discussed, both as a matter of policy and politeness.
thank you "r" for writing that out in a more articulate manner than I. I had been thinking the same thing. it doesn't matter that the judges were male, it matters that they are crazy fundies!!
ps- how can they argue that there is 'no basis in statue'? I thought that the law says that men and women must be paid the same for doing the same job. its on those posters in everyone's workplaces. seems clear to me...
I think war pigs was the first one to admit that there *is* a statute.
I realize that quaint concepts such as applying the law as written don't carry much weight here, but we don't have judges to create policy; they are supposed to apply the law as written.
When it comes to constitutional or civil rights, then, yes, the judges can decide what is and isn't contained in the law based a bit more on what's right and wrong, but not every case is supposed to be decided based on what we want the outcome to be. If we do that, we end up with right-wing judges being just as free to ignore progressive statutes based on their sense of morality.
Fortunately, Congress can fix this mess by making a new statute.
I once worked at an organization where there was a published pay scale, based on years of experience and the type of job. When employees wanted a raise beyond the yearly raise, we lobbied our management together, and engaged in meaningful discussion about the needs of employees and the needs of the organization. There was no individual behind-the-scenes negotiation with the boss, and no opportunity for hidden discrimination.
If Congress mandated a system like this (at least the uniform pay scale part), it could finally guarantee equal pay for equal work, and render this horrible Supreme Court decision relatively meaningless.
My gf was messaging me all this crazy shit from the bible today, and I think I've got it figured out now. God does exist, just as the fundies say. And he's a colossal sexist cock! Otherwise, why would he have delivered the Supreme Court to these douches? Hopefully we can find a way to scientifically prove the existence of god, so we can get started on finding a way to kill him.
I, for one, am tired of the Supreme Court being expected to do all the heavy lifting around here. As Roberts said in his confirmation hearings, if Congress wants women to be able to bring a suit after 180 days, all it needs to do is SAY SO. Congress continually passes anti-discrimination laws that are vague to the point of nonsense. We then complain that the Court fails to uphold the "spirit" of these laws when the letter of the laws is, fundamentally, the problem. I'm all for equal pay, but if you want the Court to recognize a lawsuit, it must have a basis in, ummm, the law. The Court is well within its rights to say so. Spending our time being mad at Sam Alito doesn't solve the basic problem of spinelessness and ineffectuality in Congress. The Constitution does not mandate equal pay for equal work. A federal law does. The Court can only bend the law so far before it breaks entirely.
torrentprime 15: The problem is that the statue is ambiguous: "A charge ... shall be filed within one hundred and eighty days after the alleged unlawful employment practice occurred ..." where an unlawful employment practice is "to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation ... because of such individual’s ... sex ...." But does such a practice occur when the amount of payment is decided or when the payment is made?
Where's Judah to say that this is an overreaction and probably this woman just sucks at her job and that explains why she's paid 40% less? I'm waiting.
Bacon Cheese Egg: The statute is ambiguous, I'll admit that. But I don't think it's actually that hard to figure out. If the Congressional intent was to allow each individual paycheck to constitute an act of discrimination, and not the determination of what that paycheck would contain, then, in essence they'd have set no rational time limit to file suit, since the 180 day limit could never come into effect (with only 15 days separating paychecks for most workers.) 180 days is an extremely short period of time, which shows, as Justice Alito pointed out, that Congress clearly intended to set very strict time limits on addressing the discrimination. I can't quite imagine that they merely intended to give the IMPRESSION of strict limits, while actually making no limits at all.
Congress should amend the statute by extending the deadline considerably and making it plain that, say, any determination by an employer of compensation (including after performance reviews) starts the clock ticking all over again. But to base the statute on each paycheck just doesn't make much sense to me. Certainly, it doesn't make sense that such was Congress's intent. Which means that, like it or not, the Supreme Court made the correct ruling on this issue. So, stop bitching about "fundies" and "men" and start making some phone calls to your congressmen, some of whom happen to be women!
A clarification: the last sentence of my above comment was not directed at the person I originally responded to, but rather at a whole slew of other commenters here who are under the impression that any legal decision they disagree with is the work of nefariously evil Catholic men.
THe problem is not that the statute is ambiguous, its more an issue of which side of the statute they decided to apply. Ginsberg's disenting opinion is ver revealing. There are two kinds of actionable cases of discrimination, those taht are dicrete and easily definable actions such as termination and others that relate to "hostile environments' Ginsberg argued that the pay in this case was more cumulative as at first she was paid comparably and only after the cumulative effects over the course of nearly 20 years did the discrimination become apparent. THe majority decision was based on each tiem the woman was given a smaller raise than her male counterparts constituted a single discrete act that would ahve been easily definable. And there was precedent cited by Ginsberg in her deisenting opinion.
@9: I don't know, what kind of person could work somewhere for 6 months and have no idea how much her co-workers were making?
Where's Judah to say that this is an overreaction and probably this woman just sucks at her job and that explains why she's paid 40% less? I'm waiting.
It's over at Erica's blog, Kiru. I mean my response is over at Erica's blog-- my actual response looks nothing like the one you're attributing to me.
"The gender of the Justices clearly has nothing to do with their ruling."
I'm just throwing this out there, but the argument is going the other way: no women voted for it (although I think Ginsberg is the only woman).
There's really no guarantee that Miers would have voted with the majority on this one, considering that I believe the reason everyone said "NO" to her is because she had never once been a judge.
All I'm saying is, idealogical split or no, it'd be a hard argument to make that any standard, stereotypical conservative-religious viewpoint (which is more or less what we're dealing with here) respects womens rights. "Had nothing to do with it?" No. "Had everything to do with it?" Also no. But I somehow doubt that a conservative, female judge would have looked so damn hard for a technicality to rule on. And if she did, then she's as big an idiot as the majority here.
If there were eight women on this court and five of them voted along Ginsburg's lines, would we be saying that "five women looked so damn hard for a techincality to rule on?" And I hate to be the defender of conservative judges, really I do, but dismissing their ruling as a "technicality" is to presume that judges need not to constrained by the technical constraints of the law -- that law can be made by judges simply because it is "right" and not because it is the law. It's also a technicality when a liberal judge tosses out evidence of murder at a trial because conservative police and prosecutors failed to respect the defendant's Constitutional rights. Technicality has become a pejorative, but it's worth remembering that it is largely conservatives who have made it so, and done so unfairly.
As for Ginsburg's notion of cumulative effects, that's all well and good, and obviously makes an important point about the nature of discrimination and the remedies available for it. The problem is that the statute in question does not offer a cumulative analysis, or at the very least doesn't do it very explicitly. So if anyone is searching for a technicality that will allow her principles to stand before the law, it's Ginsburg (and, you know, those three men who voted with her.)
That's true enough. I wasn't trying to argue the legal viewpoints or standards of judgement, however. I was merely stating that I don't trust conservative judges any farther than I can throw them, and to blanketly state that "gender had nothing to do with it" is probably a little bit off. That's an assumption that personal opinions never, ever play into a judge's decision (and in particular, this one), which is sort of a bold statement, I think.
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