The most inept comment to come from a Republican official this election season wasn’t from Richard Mourdock, the Senate candidate in Indiana, or from Todd Akin, a candidate in Missouri, both of whom made outlandish comments about rape. Women’s health wasn’t the issue either.
It was uttered by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., about equal pay for equal work, specifically the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009.
“Just because they call a piece of legislation an equal pay bill doesn’t make it so,” Rubio said in an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week.”
“In fact, much of this legislation is, in many respects, nothing but an effort to help trial lawyers collect their fees and file lawsuits, which may not contribute at all whatsoever to increasing pay equity in the workplace,” he said.
The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act is the most uncontroversial law enacted by President Barack Obama. In fact, it was the first piece of legislation he signed into law. The law amends another law, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, in order to extend the statute of limitations on the ability to file suit for pay discrimination.
Near her retirement, Lilly Ledbetter (the law’s namesake) discovered that her male coworkers were earning much more than she was, so she sued her employer – the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company. Her case went all the way to the Supreme Court, where she lost.
The Supreme Court “ruled that Ledbetter’s claim was time-barred by Title VII’s limitations period,” reads a summary by The Oyez Law Project.
The limitations dictated that a suit could only be filed 180 days after the initial discriminatory pay was issued. Ledbetter, the Supreme Court ruled, had missed her opportunity. But, this was upended and corrected by the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act which causes the statute of limitations to restart after each payment that is discriminatory.
Perhaps the law will help lawyers, but not in the way Rubio thinks. A survey taken by the National Association of Women Lawyers showed that “women attorneys’ median pay still trails behind their male peers’ at the largest law firms despite negligible differences in billable hours and client lists,” reported Forbes Magazine on Oct. 28.
Even women who had supposedly broken through the glass ceiling and had become part-owners of private law firms complained about a 50 percent difference in pay compared to their male partners. This discrimination extends to other industries and across the economy.
Education does not eliminate this difference in pay. Data from Demos, the research center, shows that women still make between $6,720 to $8,000 less than their male counterparts no matter the level of educational attainment.
As Ledbetter has pointed out women earn on average 77 cents to a man’s dollar. This discrimination in pay not only explicitly effects how much a woman earns, but implicitly effects how much she can contribute to her retirement plan, or how much she will be able to withdraw from Social Security.
The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act should not be controversial. Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee for president, has not stated clearly whether or not he plans to repeal the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and his vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan did not support it in Congress.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson, R-Texas, Sen. Olympia Snowe and Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine; all of the Republican women in the Senate voted for the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. So what is wrong with the Republican men?
