Designating Certain Land Components of the National Wilderness Preservation System

Floor Speech

DESIGNATING CERTAIN LAND COMPONENTS OF THE NATIONAL WILDERNESS PRESERVATION SYSTEM -- (Senate - January 14, 2009)

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Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, I first thank Senator Enzi for his accommodation to allow me to follow Senator Mikulski.

I thank the Senator from Maryland. She has been tireless on this issue and a champion for women and their families for many years. I am very proud to be with her today as she leads the Senate and the country in restoring the credibility and confidence of women across this country to be able to get what they should be getting when they go to work every day. So I thank her for that.

This Senate has a very proud history of working across the aisle to pass civil rights laws. Those historic laws ensure that all people in our Nation have equal rights regardless of their race, their religion, gender, or national origin. I am very proud that because of those laws, my daughter now has the right to work in the same job and achieve the same success as my son.

But despite all of the years of progress, we have not eliminated unfairness in the workplace. I believe we should all fight long and hard whenever Americans are denied the ability to fight for their rights, and that is why I have come to the floor today to speak.

With its May 2007 decision, Ledbetter v. Goodyear, the Supreme Court reversed years of progress in the fight for fairness in the workplace. Their decision made it almost impossible for workers who suffer discrimination to seek justice. It went against congressional intent, and it set us back 40 years in the fight for equal opportunity in the workplace. The decision was wrong, and we here in this body need to take action before it weakens our civil rights even further.

So today as we begin this new Congress and a new administration, I am urging all of our colleagues to support the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act to reverse Ledbetter v. Goodyear and ensure that our workers again have a fair shot at fighting discrimination.

Before I describe the bill that is before us today, I want to say a few words about Lilly Ledbetter and her Supreme Court case. As the Senator from Maryland talked about, Lilly Ledbetter worked for Goodyear Tire for 19 years before she found out that her male counterparts were being paid more for doing the exact same work. So she sued, charging her employers with pay discrimination.

But, as you know now, the Court sided with Goodyear. It was not because the Court thought she was wrong. They, in fact, agreed she had been discriminated against. But the Court said she did not have the right to sue. That is right, that is what the Court said. They said she should have sued within 180 days of her very first unfair paycheck, even though she did not know about it until many years later.

It made that ruling despite the fact that courts around this country had for years assumed the opposite, that the clock starts ticking after any discriminatory act, including every time a worker is paid unfairly. Now, I think that sounds an awful lot like our Supreme Court is asking workers everywhere to be mind readers. It is unfair and it is not what Congress intended when we created that law in the first place.

Lilly Ledbetter has, to her credit, not let that decision go without a fight. She has been a tireless champion for her rights, and I truly want to thank her for everything she has done to raise awareness about her case.

The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act before us today would reverse the Court's unfair decision. It will allow workers to file a claim within 180 days of any discriminatory paycheck, and it would again allow workers to discover the facts and to challenge ongoing discrimination as Congress always intended. Purely and simply, it restores a worker's right to fight for her rights.

I also want to take a little bit of time to talk about why it is so important that we ensure our workers have all of the tools necessary to fight for their rights. As I said earlier, what we are talking about today is not just a philosophical issue of rights and discrimination. The truth is that although we have made tremendous progress in civil rights, there is a lot of work to be done yet. The pay gap is only one example. Women still make less than men even though they are doing the exact same work. On average today, women earn only 77 cents for every dollar that is paid to their male coworkers. That pay gap, by the way, is even wider for African-American and Latino women. African-American women earn 67 cents on a dollar, and Latino women earn only 56 cents for every dollar a white man makes.

Pay discrimination like that has real and harmful impacts on our families and for our Nation as a whole. It hurts an individual's ability to earn a living or to care for their children or to contribute fully to society. Yet it is so deeply ingrained in our society today that many jobs dominated by women pay less than jobs dominated by men even when the work they do is almost the same. That disparity hurts millions of families. In almost 10 million households today, mothers are the breadwinners. In many of those cases, those women are also supporting their parents and other extended family members and, in far too many of those households, women have to struggle to pay for rent or heat or food or gas, much less send those kids to college.

Think of how much better off our families and our country would be if women were paid a wage equal to men, especially, of course, as we face this deepening economic crisis and all of our expenses are rising every day. If women and men made an equal wage, single working women would have 17 percent more income every year. Ensuring that they have a fair paycheck would cut their poverty rate in half. That is to the benefit of this entire country.

There is one other issue I want to raise. Although the Ledbetter case involves gender discrimination, the decision applies to all discrimination: religion, race, age, disability, national origin. I think it is only fitting that in the days before we honor the life and the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. we are considering this issue today. The truth is, all the laws we pass guaranteeing rights have little meaning if Americans do not have the ability to challenge the discrimination in court.

This case could set a terrible precedent. We run the risk that antidiscrimination laws will grow weaker, not stronger, if we do not act here in the Senate. So I urge our colleagues to support this bill to reverse this unfair decision and restore congressional intent and to ensure the Senate's history of protecting civil rights will not be eroded.

I again thank my colleague from Maryland, Senator Mikulski, for her tremendous fight over so many years to make sure that women have equal access in the workplace.

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