Wednesday, April 23, 2008

It's Already Starting

I had to laugh at the inanity of this story.

The spin starts in just the first two sentences.
Republican Sen. John McCain, campaigning through poverty-stricken cities and towns, said Wednesday he opposes a Senate bill that seeks equal pay for women because it would lead to more lawsuits.

The Senate had scheduled a late Wednesday vote on the measure, which would make it easier for women to sue their employers for pay discrimination.


First, there is already a law on the books -- called, oddly enough, the Equal Pay Act -- that makes it illegal to discriminate in pay on the basis of gender when people are performing jobs that require equal effort, skill, and responsibility, and which are performed under similar working conditions.

The current bill is the result of a 2007 Supreme Court decision, Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., Inc., in which the Court held that, in order to make a claim of pay discrimination under the law, you must do so in a timely fashion, as the laws require.

However, the Democrat Party-sponsored law, written in a clear attempt to pander, effectively eliminates the time requirement by making it restart with each paycheck thereafter. Furthermore, it allows, not just the employee themselves, but anyone who was "affected" by a pay decision, to file a lawsuit.

Put bluntly, if this passes, you can now file a pay discrimination claim on behalf of your dead grandfather for the fact that he didn't get a raise sixty years ago. Notice how that fact, plus the obvious consequence of an explosion of such lawsuits, is scrupulously avoided in the article.

Probably because most Americans have a bit more sense of fairness than that.

Update: So does, as it turns out, enough of the Senate.

And I love how Barbara Mikulski screams about a "revolution". I, for one, think it should start with someone filing a lawsuit against her parents and their grocery store for a "discriminatory" pay decision they had made thirty years earlier.

After all, she should support that, shouldn't she?

No comments: