McCain opposes equal pay bill in Senate
By LIBBY QUAID
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — 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.
Instead, McCain says women need "more training and education." Clearly McClueless doesn't understand the concept of "equal pay for equal work." That means, you know, they already have the training and education because they are doing the same job, they just aren't getting the same pay.
Excuse me while I bang my head on the desk. Repeatedly.
But back to our story:
Senate Republicans killed the bill Wednesday night on a 56-42 vote that denied the measure the 60 votes needed to advance it to full debate and a vote. Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., had delayed the vote to give McCain's Democratic rivals, Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, time to return to Washington to support the measure, which would make it easier for women to sue their employers for pay discrimination.
McCain skipped the vote to campaign in New Orleans.
Remember folks, “60 is the new 50.” Whatever happened to the glorious “up or down vote”? But I digress.
So with the Bush economy in the toilet, the Republican Party stands with Big Business against working women. Their standard-bearer this election, John McCain, supports that position whole-heartedly. Because “lawsuits” would be, like, icky and stuff.
Well excuse me but lawsuits are how we in this system right wrongs and past injustices. It would be nice if we could click our heels and sprinkle fairy dust and have everyone magically do the right thing but that just doesn’t happen. Sometimes we need to take people to court to right a wrong, for example, the one experienced by Lilly Ledbetter:
It is named for Lilly Ledbetter, a supervisor at the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co.'s plant in Gadsden, Ala., who sued for pay discrimination just before retiring after a 19-year career there. By the time she retired, Ledbetter made $6,500 less than the lowest-paid male supervisor and claimed earlier decisions by supervisors kept her from making more.
The Supreme Court voted 5-4 last year to throw out her complaint, saying she had waited too long to sue.
Ledbetter’s story actually gets worse. After 20 years of being treated inferior to other employees because of her gender, Ledbetter finally got some justice through the courts. Until the GOP-dominated Supreme Court took it all away, that is:
At the end of the trial, the jury found that Goodyear had discriminated against me in violation of Title VII. The jury awarded me backpay as well as $4,662 for mental anguish and $3,285,979 in punitive damages. Although the trial judge agreed that the jury’s verdict was amply supported by the evidence at trial, he had to reduce the punitive damages and mental anguish award to the $300,000 statutory cap.
The Supreme Court took it all away, even the backpay. They said I should have complained every time I got a smaller raise than the men, even if I didn’t know what the men were getting paid and even if I had no way to prove that the decision was discrimination. They said that once 180 days passes after the pay decision is made, the worker is stuck with unequal pay for equal work under Title VII for the rest of her career and there is nothing illegal about that under the statute.
Justice Ginsburg hit the nail on the head when she said that the majority’s rule just doesn’t make sense in the real world. You can’t expect people to go around asking their coworkers how much money they’re making. At a lot of places, that could get you fired. And nobody wants to be asked those kinds of questions anyway.
If you like this stuff then keep voting Republican, people. There will be a lot more under a McCain presidency.
