A giant "Eff You" to bumblin' John Roberts

Yesterday Congress struck a blow against pay discrimination, undoing a pet cause of the Bush Administration -- and of the Roberts court -- by passing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act:

The Senate approved landmark worker rights legislation Thursday that will make it easier for those who think they have endured pay discrimination to seek legal help. The vote was 61-36.

The House approved a similar measure Jan. 9, three days after the 111th Congress convened. Because the Senate made modest changes in the House version, the House must pass it again. Once it does, as is assured, this will be one of the first bills that President Barack Obama signs into law.

This culminates a two-year effort, mostly by Democrats, that made one-time tire plant supervisor Lilly Ledbetter a civil rights icon and a political star.

The legislation overrides a May 2007 Supreme Court ruling that Ledbetter, a Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. employee in Gadsden, Ala., couldn’t sue her employer for pay discrimination because she didn’t file suit within 180 days of the alleged discriminatory act.

“It set us back 40 years in our fight for equal opportunity in the workplace,” said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash.

Ledbetter roamed the Capitol’s halls Thursday, explaining to lawmakers and reporters that she was unaware of the pay disparity during most of the 19 years she worked at Goodyear.

“Pay levels were a big secret,” she said, “but an anonymous person left a note in my mailbox at work one day, comparing my pay to that of three male managers — and that’s when I knew I’d been the victim of pay discrimination.”

This isn't a difficult-to-define case of trying to assess work of equal value; this is a case of a woman being paid significantly less for doing THE SAME JOB as men. The insult in the law that was upheld in the Ledbetter decision was that it was somehow incumbent on the worker to try to dig out the pay scales and find out what everyone else was making within the first 180 days of being hired, and that if you didn't immediately start out in an adversarial position with a new employer, it was tough noogies for you.

For the record, the Republicans who crossed over were Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, Kay Bailey Hutchison, and Arlen Specter. No male Republicans other than Specter voted for this bill, and no Democrats crossed to the Dark Side, which means that all but one of the thirty-five Republican men in the Senate believes that paying women less than men for EXACTLY THE SAME JOB is perfectly OK. I wonder, then, how they expect these women to feed the babies that Republicans want to force them to have?