Days Go By
Another case of employment discrimination (in this case, pay disparity), not being taken seriously by the Supreme Court. Talk about a bogus interpretation of a filing deadline. How is a paycheck disparity resulting from gender discrimination not a unique instance of harm?
But since this is a statutory case, I don’t need to hear lectures on whether the decision was legally sound or not. If the Court is right about the statutory mandate, it’s obviously an atrocious policy, and Congress should change it. So I look forward to all the regular commentators who love to berate me about how I like to substitute politics for law to seize this chance to show how committed they are to the political side of lawmaking and lobby Congress to make this law into one that actually stands a chance at protecting women from gender-based pay discrimination.
11 Responses to “Days Go By”
You do have to wonder when this 180 days should have started. The first time you don’t get a raise you can’t be sure, small bonus who knows why right? At some point there does need to be a limit. If she thought for 20 years there was a problem 20 years later does seem a bit much. I am obviously not a legal scholar but it does seem to be a complicated issue.
You lose again. Even the content you report shows how badly you lose:
[Supreme Court's] arch-reactionary newest member
What a laughable lie.
This sounds like more blaming the courts for the Congress’s poorly written laws.
It could also be that some are upset that the court didn’t make up “law” in its ruling, in place of what actually was written by Congress.
I’m not a legal scholar, but there might be a way for the future plantifs to work this into something pretty close to fair as long as they catch on to the discrimination before retirement. If a person noticed their pay was significantly less than comparable positions for no explainable reason, they could request a raise. Being turned down for that specific raise could then probably be viewed as a separate discriminatory act, giving you a new 180 to file. This seems fair to me because it provides a way outside of the courts to resolve this and gives what is perhaps simply unintentional a way to correct itself.
A more fair way would certainly be to consider each paycheck to be a separate act, and therefore being able to recoup undervalued pay up to 180 days before the filing, but not earlier. I think Entropy is right however that this is a problem best handled by congress.
Wow, DLS, read what I wrote:
“But since this is a statutory case, I don’t need to hear lectures on whether the decision was legally sound or not. If the Court is right about the statutory mandate, it’s obviously an atrocious policy, and Congress should change it.” (emphasis added)
I’m described as a pretty chill guy most days, but basic literacy is a fair pre-requisite to commenting, no? There’s no hard legal maxim (and certainly nothing intuitive) that would demand we not treat each paycheck as a “separate act” that would trigger its 180 day count–either way is a point of interpretation, and Ginsburg’s seems far more sensible based on the intent and text of the law. But I specifically noted that the legal question is in some ways irrelevant, because I believe that in the wake of the decision we should unite and demand that Congress change the law. I even put it front and center in the TMV side of the post, so I knew you wouldn’t miss it.
I can read. You assume too much that is wrong.
“But since this is a statutory case, I don’t need to hear lectures on whether the decision was legally sound or not.”
Activists do not care about such things. They simply want a court to tell them what they want to hear, so they get what they want.
Okay, but I didn’t write that. I said that I was willing to defer the question of whether this was a good or bad legal decision, because its an unambiguously bad policy decision that Congress is free to change at any time. So we can all unite happily to say “regardless of whether we think that this is a good legal decision, it clearly revealed a loophole in the law that needs to be closed. So, let’s work together to close it.” Hiding behind the judicial activism debate makes me think you don’t care about fixing the actual problem in the first place–you want to hide behind the courts to dodge your responsibility to support good law-making by the legislature.
This is a ruling that could well, as noted, lead to unintended consequences.
One, as noted in multiple articles, is that it would now behoove people to ‘sue early, and sue often’. Over time, that will consume a lot of resources, and likely lead to more and more adverse (to the companies) verdicts, and that will lead to more and more out of court settlements, and THAT will lead to even more lawsuits. It is a well known vicious cycle.
The other one (much less likely) is that it will motivate Congress to rewrite a truly poorly crafted bill.
Austin: See the delightful PG for more on that front.
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