Posted on by Helen Boyd

Tell McCain to Get Bent

John McCain has just opposed the Fair Pay Act, and suggested that women, perhaps, need more education and training.

Go to MoveOn.org and sign the petition, then, end them your resume so they can show John McCain exactly how much training and education we already have.

6 Replies to “Tell McCain to Get Bent”

  1. I’m afraid I have no idea what encompasses the Fair Pay Act (being English!), the title is obviously very positive.

    I get very lost when you say that McCain suggested that women need more education and training. This supposes that women are in some way generally less educated and less trained. Bizarre. How can anyone think like that? and worse, get away with saying something so massively stupid without public ridicule?

    By the way, McCain in the UK is a name for a bag of frozen chips (fries).

    Luce/Will (to use both femme and masculin names)

  4. Just a quick clarification. It looks like MoveOn has some facts off. Please see this editorial in support of the Act from the NYT.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/opinion/23wed2.html?ref=opinion

    The Act is not about equal pay. It is about when it is feasible to sue. The Supreme Court apparently placed a statute of limitation on the length of time when a law suit can be filed in the Ledbetter case. But it did not negate the previous precedent of “equal pay, equal work”.

    It looks like this bill is about extending that statute of limitation, not about MoveOn’s contention that it refers to training.

    I don’t know what McCain said about it. These comments are merely to offer more specificity as to what the Act contains.

  5. The Act is about restoring what was accepted legal precedent. Previously, the 180 days started when the worker received the unequal pay. The Lily Ledbetter case (Supreme Court) re-set when that 180 days started – to when the company *started* discriminating. So according to them, since Goodyear started discriminating against her way back when, EVEN THOUGH SHE WAS STILL BEING PAID NOT EQUALLY TO HER MALE PEERS, she couldn’t sue.

    The Act was meant to reverse that bullshit. What the case did was effectively grandfather in a bunch of companies that were paying women unfairly AND who kept them in the dark more than 180 days about that unequal pay.

    Katha Pollitt explains it pretty succinctly:

    “As far as concrete setbacks go, look no further than the case of Lilly Ledbetter, whose right to sue for pay discrimination was denied by the Supreme Court last May. In a 5-to-4 decision, the Justices overturned the standard interpretation of existing law to declare that Ledbetter was twenty years too late: the victim of pay discrimination must sue within six months of the initial discriminatory act–never mind whether she knew about it (many employers, including Ledbetter’s, forbid workers from discussing their salaries; she found out she was paid less than any man at her level from an anonymous tip). Given the realities of life, the Court has given employers the nod to pay women less, as long as they can keep the women in the dark for 180 days. In April a bill to restore women’s right to sue failed in the Senate, 56-to-42, because for some reason everything now needs sixty votes to become law. John McCain said the bill would lead to too many lawsuits (hello? all it would have done was restore the law we’d lived with for forty-four years); what women needed was more “education and training.” Because right now, women are just too dumb to merit equal pay.”

    Which you can find here: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080526/pollitt

  6. Thanks Helen for the additional information to clarify accuracy. The Supreme Court decision essentially created an almost impossible hurdle to litigate pay discrimination because most white collar salaries are confidential in private firms. But this decision might have created a minefield for companies too.

    Valid arguments can be made for differences in pay due to performance, credentials, etc. But when the S-C created this hurdle, it set the statute of limitation at a point whereby performance “over time” or adult education (i.e. education, degrees after entering the work force, etc.) earned later in a career are not even issues of mitigating contention when evaluating pay differences.

    Valid private companies usually have had no problem with the original intent of the law, (i.e. 180 days after the last paycheck) because valid professional HR policies then can show how performance and additional education do indeed alter pay but in a non discriminatory manner. Valid companies “want” the extended time period because their primary defense to specious litigation is based on those factors over the extended life of an employee.

    In the previous precedent, one event can not be a basis for discrimination as it is considered by the courts a random variable. The original law required proof of “consistent and cognizant” pursuit to discriminate, a component of the law that protected good companies and made a claim to discrimination harder to prove. Yet, with such a short window, it appears this legal premise is now suspect. The courts can not evaluate “consistent and cognizant” if there is no time frame to do so. Hence, only “one decision”, instead of many, might be the basis for judgment in litigation. Hence, companies might become more exposed to negative litigation results (from their perspective) because the standard to convict is now lower or will be based on significantly inadequate data.

    Hayes & Associates as well as other HR professional consulting firms publish ranges of salaries that have been accepted by the courts as reasonable variables even at entry level and of course over the life of a career. Example, a college grad of Northwestern University usually can secure a higher entry level salary than a grad from a lesser school. High academic performers, magna cum laude recipients, to name one category, also receive higher entry salaries than job applicants that graduate from the very same school. Those variables can become exponential over time.

    But the differences in entry salaries can not be gender or race related nor can the raises be gender-race biased either.

    In this context, the Supreme Court decision really helps the corporate slackers that do discriminate because performance and education differences are not even a factor in the early life of any employee. Hence, discrimination can now become a criterion for initial pay differences.

    It also hurts high performance young people that have excelled because companies will be very hesitant to provide them higher initial salaries for fear of litigation even if they deserve higher salaries and those salaries are in the previously accepted range for a job description.

    This might backfire on the slackers though and unfortunately filter negatively to good companies too. This new short window might increase litigation at early stages of employment and complicate validating data because the time requirement prevents the accumulation of sufficient data to validly disprove discrimination. It is impossible also to show how performance affects salary because there really can be no actual proven “performance” within a six month window.

    It might turn discrimination litigation into a “crap shoot”. That is not good for anybody.

    As to the McCaine quote, is there a UTube video of it?

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