Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2007 - Motion to Proceed - Resumed

Floor Speech

LILLY LEDBETTER FAIR PAY ACT OF 2007--MOTION TO PROCEED--Resumed -- (Senate - April 23, 2008)

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Mr. DURBIN. I thank Senator Kennedy, Senator Mikulski, and many others for bringing this measure before the Senate.

You remember when we debated Supreme Court Justices, and do you recall their testimony; you saw it on television. I can recall Justice Roberts, the Chief Justice, he told us he was similar to an umpire in baseball; all he did was call balls and strikes. He was not going to write the law or change the law, he was going to apply the law to the facts. Well, lo and behold, as soon as Justice Roberts and Justice Alito, the new Justices on the Supreme Court, arrived, they took a precedent, a law that had been followed for years by the Supreme Court and turned it upside down.

Lilly Ledbetter, 19 years serving as a manager in this Goodyear Tire facility in Gadsden, AL, was the only female manager in a group of 15; all the rest were men. It was not until she was about to retire that someone said to her: Incidentally, you are not being paid as much as the men who are doing the same job.

She did not realize it. How would she? Employers do not go around publishing how much they pay their employees in the newspaper, and they certainly do not post it on the bulletin board. So she had no way of knowing until the last minute. She filed a discrimination claim and said: I did the work, I deserve the pay.

It went all the way up to the Supreme Court, to new Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito. You know what they said? Your problem, Lilly Ledbetter, is you should have discovered how much they were paying the other employees at the time the initial discrimination began. That is physically impossible. They held her to a standard she could not live up to. They knew what they were doing. They were throwing out her case of wage discrimination and thousands of others. Those Justices were not calling balls and strikes, they were making new rules; and the rules were fundamentally unfair.

We have a chance today to straighten that out. I hope we have bipartisan support for it. We should be against pay discrimination for women, men, disabled, minorities. Every American deserves to be treated fairly.

The Chicago Tribune, not always a paragon of liberal ideas, said this about the Ledbetter decision by the Supreme Court:

The majority's sterile reading of the statute ignores the realities on the ground. A woman who is fired on the basis of sex knows she has been fired. But a woman who suffers pay discrimination may not discover it until years later, because employers often keep pay scales confidential. The consequences of the ruling will be to let a lot of discrimination go unpunished.

Those who vote against this effort to bring the bill to the floor will allow a lot of discrimination to go unpunished in America.

We owe the workers of America, the women of America, all workers a lot more. I encourage colleagues to support Senator Kennedy and the motion to invoke cloture.

I reserve the remainder of my time.

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