President Barack Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Pay Equity Bill today - the law for which Lilly Ledbetter bravely fought. It should be obvious that this woman took a lot of crap from Goodyear Tire and from good old boys in Alabama and everywhere.
Kudos to Barack Obama for signing the bill. But any Democratic president would have done it, and the real work was done by Lilly Ledbetter and countless ordinary women like the ones in the video clip below, as well as then Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, etc.
The law effectively overturns the 2007 ruling by the right-wing good old boys on the United States Supreme Court. One would hope that the conservative High Court will soon experience a tsunami of laws undoing the damage they have done and informing the macho Court that they are out of touch with the women whose lives they have so often harmed.
It took Ledbetter almost 20 years to discover that she was paid less than the men. By that time, the good old boys at Goodyear were getting downright honest about their discrimination against women:
Toward the end of her career, for instance, the plant manager told Ledbetter that the “plant did not need women, that [women] didn’t help it, [and] caused problems.
The conservative men on the High Court, hellbent on protecting good old boys everywhere, said that women have to discover the discrimination and file a lawsuit within 180 days. Otherwise women must do what women usually do, live with the discrimination.
In spite of the law's passage, Lilly Ledbetter will continue to live with the discrimination:
Goodyear will never have to pay me what it cheated me out of. I will never see a cent from my case. But with the passage and the president’s signature today, I have an even richer reward.
Like pretty well all laws passed on behalf of women's rights these days, this one merely recovers ground lost during the godforsaken conservative era we are at long last emerging from. It's great to recover lost ground, but we should not kid ourselves about the amount of work we must do in order to raise the deplorable status of women in this male dominated United States of America.
TGW: Lilly Ledbetter on Fair Pay and the Unfair Roberts Court (Video)
TGW: Equal Pay: Women Like Men, Only Cheaper (Video)
National Women's Law Center: The Fair Pay Campaign
LILLY M. LEDBETTER, PETITIONER v. THE GOOD-YEAR TIRE & RUBBER COMPANY, INC.
Feminist Politics Gender News Equal Pay Sexism Supreme Court Misogyny Patriarchy Goodyear Tire Alabama
