Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Fair Pay Action Alert

This just in from the ACLU:

Don't Let Employers Get Away With Pay Discrimination


Last May, the Supreme Court ruled in Ledbetter v. Goodyear that employees who have suffered years of pay discrimination cannot have their day in court if they don’t discover the discrimination within 180 days of their employer’s initial discriminatory pay decision.

The Ledbetter decision not only reversed years of employment law, it also ignored the realities of a workplace. Often employees don’t know what their co-workers are paid. Further, expecting that they learn that information within the first 180 days of a pay decision is unreasonable. Unless Congress intervenes, companies will be able to discriminate for years and unjustly profit from paying women, minorities, the elderly, and people with disabilities, as long as it keeps the discrimination secret for a few months.

The U.S. House of Representatives has passed legislation to correct this problem, and to ensure employers do not profit from years of discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, and disability, simply because their employees were unaware of the discrimination for 180 days. The bill clarified this wage discrimination is not a one-time occurrence, but rather, that each discriminatory paycheck an employer issues represents an ongoing violation of the law.

A similar bill, the Fair Pay Restoration Act (S.1843), is now before the U.S. Senate. The time has come for the Senate to correct this wrong and let American workers keep their hard-earned dollars.

Click here to take action.

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