The Wage Gap and the Supreme Court: Business As Usual (by Pamela Kruger at HuffPost)

Pamela Kruger| BIO

The Wage Gap and the Supreme Court: Business As Usual
Posted May 30, 2007 | 09:48 AM (EST)

Every week, it seems like my box is flooded with urgent emails exhorting me to sign a petition, attend a rally, or call my senator about Iraq, Darfur, global warming, gay marriage, or any number of worthy causes. But I'm not expecting to get many invites to protest yesterday's Supreme Court decision, which severely limited workers' ability to sue for pay discrimination.

Don't get me wrong. This 5-4 ruling is egregiously wrong. It overturned a jury's award to Lily Ledbetter, a Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company supervisor of 19 years who earned as much as 40 percent less than her male co-workers, finding that employees must complain within 180 days of each alleged discriminatory pay decision in order to prevail. (Never mind that employers often do their best to hide pay discrimination, or that wage gaps tend to widen over time, as subsequent raises are based on the original low pay.)

Still, when it comes to news about the wage gap between men and women these days, reaction often amounts to a collective shrug. When a new report was released last month, showing that only one year after college graduation, women earn 20 percent less than their male peers, the story wasn't splashed across the cover of Time or Newsweek. It wasn't a hot topic on the cable chat circuit, even though the research by the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation found that ten years after graduation, the gap expands, with women's salaries 31 percent lower.

Media coverage was perfunctory. I didn't get a single email about the issue, let alone hear about any churches, synagogues, or political groups chartering buses to Washington D.C. or organizing demonstrations against the injustice.

Instead of provoking outrage, the news seemed to elicit a yawn. Haven't we heard this before? As it happens, we have -- many times, over many years. In the 1980s, when so many of us were graduating from college and flooding the workforce, we even knew our number by heart: 59 cents. That was how much women, employed full-time, made for every dollar men earned; Geraldine Ferraro famously mentioned it during her vice presidential nomination acceptance speech (though numbers I've seen since suggest it was probably closer to 65 cents). Young women like myself were pretty confident that the pay gap would soon be history, as record numbers of women were getting educated and seeking professional jobs -- supposedly the reason for the gap in the first place. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/pamela-kruger-/the-wage-gap-and-the-supr_b_49672.html

Didn't see it anywhere else on the teevee. Big bidness at it again.

I have a real problem with the way the media and everyone talks about how much people EARN, especially when they're talking about overpaid CEOs.

It's doubtful that those overpaid CEOs actually EARN that much. They've just rigged the game so that they get PAID that much.

Try thinking about it that way and describing it that way. For example, "Well, I don't know how much ___ actually EARNS but I know/heard/read that _____ gets PAID $xxx amount.

Let's get people realizing that what people get PAID often has nothing to do with the value of their work or contribution. Maybe then, we can develop the realization that our labor practices are grossly unfair in this country, in many ways.

but it was all cindy all the time...there is some very interesting opinions that the supremes used..the law should be changed but there`s not a chance in hell it will be..