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Discrimination Law Suits Legal Case

June 10th, 2007 Posted by Mark

There was a pretty big Supreme Court case that just got decided a week or two back that I did not have the time to comment on when it went down, primarily because of all of the attention I have been paying to the federal minimum wage changes. But now we have a slight breather—don’t worry, I will be getting back to the federal minimum wage soon enough—let us take a look at what went down in the Supreme Court.

It was a split decision—by the count of five to four—that the Supreme Court decided that employees cannot sue their employers for discrimination instances under the Title VII clause of the law, which states that females and males must be paid the same amount of money for providing the same job at the same level of productivity, if the instances of the discrimination occurred more than 180 days before the suit was brought to trial.

The important distinction that the Supreme Court made was that the instance of discrimination and unequal pay does not happen each and every time an employee gets a pay check that does not match the pay check of the opposite sex. The instance occurs when the employer first decides to pay the employee less than their peers who are of a difference gender.

That was important in this case because the plaintiff in the case—a woman by the name of Lilly Ledbetter, had worked for her employer (Goodyear) for as much as 19 years, and it wasn’t until the end of her term with the company that she discovered that all along she had not been making as much as the men in her company. But since her employers had decided years ago not to pay her as much, under the new Supreme Court ruling, she was not able to sue her employer under the discrimination laws of the country.

Will this affect how employers protect themselves against such discrimination claims? Sure. Will this lead to new EEOC posters. I’ll keep you posted.