The longstanding precedent that in a pay discrimination case, each discriminatory paycheck is a discrete actionable wrong, regardless of when the discriminatory wage was set, is dead. We know that it is dead because the U.S. Supreme Court pronounced it so in a 5-4 decision issued Tuesday, May 29, 2007, in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., 550 U.S. ___ (2007).
Lilly Ledbetter was a supervisor at Goodyear Tire and Rubber’s plant in Gadsden, Alabama, from 1979 until her retirement in 1998. For most of those years, she worked as an area manager, a position largely occupied by men. Initially, Ledbetter’s salary was in line with the salaries of men performing substantially similar work. Over time, however, her pay slipped in comparison to the pay of male area managers with equal or less seniority. By the end of 1997, Ledbetter was the only woman working as an area manager and the pay discrepancy between Ledbetter and her 15 male counterparts was stark: Ledbetter was paid $3,727 per month; the lowest paid male area manager received $4,286 per month, the highest paid, $5,236.
Ms. Ledbetter alleged that several supervisors had in the past given her poor evaluations because of her sex; that as a result, her pay had not increased as much as it would have if she had been evaluated fairly; that those past pay decisions affected the amount of her pay throughout her employment; and that by the end of her employment, she was earning significantly less than her male colleagues.
Her problem, according to the Supreme Court majority, was that she was complaining about the current effects of past discrimination that occurred more than 180 days before she filed her EEOC charge. EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) is the federal agency charged with enforcing Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. The Court said “Ledbetter should have filed an EEOC charge within 180 days after each allegedly discriminatory employment decision was made and communicated to her.”
The moral is that employees who fail to heed this advice can expect to have their claim thrown out as untimely.
The Supreme Court got it wrong in Ledbetter. NAACP Image Awards - Los Angeles, CA
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