Democrats Strike Early With Labor Rights Bills
http://www.truthout.org/010909N
Washington - Congressional Democrats are wasting no time in promoting
labor rights issues they argue have been thwarted during eight years
of the Bush administration.
Two pay discrimination bills on the House floor Friday could be
among the first that labor-friendly Barack Obama signs into law when
he becomes president later this month.
"It is of the highest priority to us," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
said in explaining why the House is taking up the bills in the first
week of the new session.
Last year, President George W. Bush threatened to veto both the
Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which would overturn a 2007 Supreme
Court
decision making it more difficult to sue over past pay
discrimination,
and the Paycheck Fairness Act, which closes loopholes allowing
employers to get around the 1963 law requiring equal pay for equal
work.
In contrast, Obama took time off from his campaign last April to
speak on the Senate floor in favor of the Ledbetter bill. The House
passed both bills in the last session of Congress, but the Senate
last
year fell three votes short of stopping a GOP-led filibuster on the
Ledbetter bill. It did not debate the Paycheck Fairness Act.
The Senate, now with a fortified Democratic majority, plans to
take up the Ledbetter bill next week. No date has been set for
considering the second measure.
Votes on the two labor rights measures could be the opening salvo
before Congress moves to a far more controversial bill that both
unions and business groups see as fundamentally shifting the balance
of power in labor efforts to organize workplaces.
The Employee Free Choice Act would take away the right of
employers to demand secret-ballot elections by workers before unions
could be recognized. Business groups, preparing to spend millions to
lobby against it, say it is an affront to democratic principles.
Unions say companies have used secret ballots to intimidate pro-union
workers and that the bill could help reverse the downward trend in
union membership.
Lily Ledbetter was a supervisor at a Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co.
plant in Gadsden Ala. She sued the company over pay discrimination
when she learned, shortly before retiring after a 19-year career
there, that she earned less than any male supervisor. A jury ruled in
her favor, but the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 vote, threw out her
complaint, saying she had failed to sue within the 180-day deadline
after a discriminatory pay decision was made.
"This ruling just doesn't make sense in the real world,"
Ledbetter
said in a telephone news conference Thursday. "In a lot of places you
could get fired for asking your co-workers how much they are making."
The bill the House is considering would clarify that each
paycheck
resulting from discrimination would constitute a new violation,
extending the 180-day statute of limitations.
"The Supreme Court's decision allows employers to get away with
pay discrimination so long as they can keep it hidden for a
sufficient
period of time, and that's just unacceptable," said Rep. George
Miller, D-Calif., chairman of the House Education and Labor
Committee.
Critics said the bill would allow people to file discrimination
suits against employers for decades-old actions. But the liberal
Alliance for Justice said the Supreme Court decision had already
seriously impacted worker rights: it said that since the 2007 ruling
federal and other courts had cited Ledbetter in 347 cases involving
pay discrimination and other issues such as fair housing and the
availability of sports programs for women.
The Paycheck Fairness Act seeks to close loopholes in the 1963
Equal Pay Act by making clear that victims of gender-based
discrimination can sue for compensatory and punitive damages. It also
puts the burden on employers to prove that any disparities in wages
are job-related and not sex-based, and bars employers from
retaliating
against workers who discuss or disclose salary information with their
co-workers.
Randel Johnson, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's vice president on
labor issues, said his group would oppose the measure, saying it was
a
"giveaway to the trial lawyers" and would "make it difficult for an
employer to defend any kind of pay disparity."
But Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., who first introduced the
legislation 12 years ago, said that, with women still earning only 78
cents for every dollar men earn in the same job, Congress has to
strengthen the law. "It is our moment to fight for economic freedom,"
she said. "To do anything less would be to shortchange women and
their
families everywhere."
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