Lilly’s Big Day

[groovedaddy]

President Obama is scheduled to sign the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law today. (This is, technically, his second bill-signing, not the first. But you cannot possibly expect us to make a fuss about legislation fixing the salary of the secretary of the interior.)

“I’m so excited I can hardly stand it,” Ledbetter said recently after the bill passed the Senate.

Obama told her story over and over when he campaigned for president: How Ledbetter, now 70, spent years working as a plant supervisor at a tire factory in Alabama. How, when she neared retirement, someone slipped her a pay schedule that showed her male colleagues were making much more money than she was. A jury found her employer, the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, to be really, really guilty of pay discrimination. But the Supreme Court, in a 5-to-4 decision led by the Bush appointees, threw out Ledbetter’s case, ruling that she should have filed her suit within 180 days of the first time Goodyear paid her less than her peers.

(Let us pause briefly to contemplate the chances of figuring out your co-workers’ salaries within the first six months on the job.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/29/opinion/29collins.html?th&emc=th

[blueraven95]

1. you know, I really wish this author...

...hadn't used the word "feisty" in the second to last paragraph:

" It’s a good day for the feisty working women who went to court to demand their rights and the frequently underpaid lawyers who championed them. They’re strangers to one another; most of them made their stands and then returned to their ordinary lives. But they’re a special sorority all the same. And Lilly Ledbetter got to go to the inauguration and dance with the new president.

“Tell her congratulations,” said Lorena Weeks."

Feisty so often has a connotation that allows weakens the person described instead of strengthens - sort of in an "oh, how cute" kind of way. I wish instead that the author had said "It's a good day for the strong working women..." or something along those lines.

Sorry to nitpick, but what these women have accomplished should be seen as accomplishments of strong, extremely capable women.

[catgirl]

2. Cheers!!!!