Obama's first bill narrows wage gap

An anonymous note in her mailbox confirmed Lilly Ledbetter’s suspicions.

"My job demanded a lot, and I gave it 100 percent. I kept up with every one of my male co-workers. But toward the end of my 19 years at Goodyear, I began to suspect that I wasn’t getting paid as much as men doing the same job," said Ledbetter, a retired supervisor from Goodyear Tire and Rubber in Gadsden, Ala., in remarks to the 2008 Democratic National Convention (DNC).

"Despite praising my work, Goodyear was giving me smaller raises than my male co-managers, over and over," added Ledbetter, now 70. "I was treated like a second-class citizen."

So she sued her employer for pay discrimination.

"I had no idea equal pay was so far behind. I thought this was a ‘southern’ problem, but I've learned that it's national," she told U.S. News and World Report.

Ledbetter, who retired in 1998, won the suit and was awarded back pay and $360,000 in damages, only to have it overturned in an appeal by Goodyear. The Supreme Court decided that she didn’t file her lawsuit against Goodyear within 180 days after the discrimination occurred, as required by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The court calculated the deadline from the day Goodyear made its original decision to pay Ledbetter less than her male colleagues. The law had previously been interpreted to mean the clock did not start until she received her last discriminatory paycheck.

"I had hoped the verdict would make my company feel the sting, learn a lesson and never again treat women unfairly. But they appealed, all the way to the Supreme Court and … sided with big business," she said of the 5-4 decision in 2007.

In 2008 Congress attempted to pass legislation to overturn the Supreme Court ruling, only to be blocked by a Republican filibuster. The new Congress took up the issue right away, and on Jan. 29, 2009, President Barack Obama made the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act the first piece of legislation he signed into law. The new law restores the rights of workers by providing that the 180-day time limit for filing lawsuits does not begin to run until the last discriminatory act by an employer.

When Congress passed the Equal Pay Act in 1963 to battle unequal pay for equal work among women and minorities in the workplace, women earned only 58 cents for every dollar a man made. By 1977 the disparity had shrunk to 77 cents and remained so for 32 years.

Over the course of 47 years the unequal wage gap between men and women amounts to an estimated loss in wages for women of $700,000 for high school graduates, $1.2 million for college graduates and $2 million for professional school graduates.

If a wage gap didn’t exist, poverty rates for single moms would be cut in half and poverty rates for dual-earner families would be cut by about 25 percent, according to the National Women’s Law Center.

Ledbetter, widowed in December, won’t get restitution of lost wages, and her case can’t be retried. She lives on a pension, check to check, but her gain is more personal than monetary. Her fight made her a pioneer, resulting in progress for all women.

As she summed it up: "My case is over. I will never receive the pay I deserve, but there will be a far richer reward if we secure fair pay for our children and grandchildren, so that no one will ever again experience the discrimination that I did. Equal pay for equal work is a fundamental American principle. With all of us working together, we can have the change we need and the opportunity we all deserve."

Gwynne Marie Cobb