Relief for Working Women

Martha Burk is a political psychologist and director of the Corporate Accountability Project for the  National Council of Women's Organizations. This column was distributed by Minuteman Media and is reprinted by permission.

Working women and their allies have been crying "foul" to Congress ever since May, when the Bush Supreme Court delivered what could be a devastating blow to sisters experiencing discrimination in pay and promotion.

After many years of employment at Goodyear, Lilly Ledbetter learned that she had been paid less all along than all of the men at her management level, even those with less seniority. She sued and won in a lower court. But the Supremes said she had no case, because she didn't bring the action within 180 days from the time her discriminatory pay was initially set, even though it had been a tightly held secret in the company for over a decade before she found out about it. In an extremely rare act for her, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg read a stinging rebuke of the decision from the bench, saying in effect that the majority of the Court is either clueless about sex discrimination in the workplace, or worse, they don't care.

Congress, notoriously slow to act on everything from money to fix bridges to cutting funds for the biggest war folly in the country's history, is, for once, listening. The Ledbetter Fair Pay Act would put into law what courts had always said prior to the Bush-appointed conservative majority — when someone has been shorted on pay for years, each new paycheck is a new offense. That means women have 180 days to sue from the time they find out about discrimination, not from the time the discrimination initially started. The bill passed the U.S. House of Representatives on July 31, with over 17,000 letters to Congress helping to make it happen. Whether it has anything to do with the presidential campaign is anybody's guess, but the Democratic candidates are giving the bill, S.1843, a push in the Senate, talking about it in the debates and on the stump.

Predictably, right-wing knives are drawn, led by the business lobby and bolstered by fundamentalist religious groups. A barrage of instant mythology that has sprung up about what the bill would do - everything from drastically changing our main employment law (Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act) to giving women workers unlimited time to pursue stale claims. All of this is hogwash, but it doesn't stop the misinformation machine that reaches all the way to the White House. In the eyes of some, anything that helps working women is inherently bad -because they ought to stay home in the first place. Never mind that their families need the money to survive.

Meanwhile, advocates are not waiting for the Almighty to provide relief —a broad coalition of groups is calling on the Senate to do it instead. Urging a vote in the next few weeks, advocates are asking women to contact their Senators to urge that they sign on. In this day of national gridlock on other matters of importance, it's the least they can do for working women.