He got TWO appointments, damn it all

[trinityvixen]

Sandra Day, I know you're old, but you couldn't have waited it out even a few more years? Sheesh.

Take a look at this ruling: Pay discrimination? You don't say. Hope you found out about it in time.

Look, if you're "corporations, yay!" in life, I get how this looks great to you. Otherwise, fuck you, too, Alito and Roberts (Scalia, Kennedy and Thomas: y'all should consider yourselves fucked already, many times).

Pay discrimination is an insidious evil in this world, but it's not one you can always immediately--as in the 180 days this fucking court majority thinks isn't anything like immediate--put proof to. Hell, in the case that was decided, the issue of pay discrimination arose over raises that were too low, not a salary that was. That kind of thing doesn't even kick in until you've been at a place for longer than half a year (or so has been my experience). Why the hell isn't every paycheck or raise that comes in below the norm for others considered discriminatory? If someone is consistently underpaying you, you might not notice for a looooong time because a regular low-balling can easily seem like what you should be earning. After all, you trust both your employer and their HR department to crunch the numbers correctly; if you can't, what the fuck are they there for? And, chances are good, that you're not going to go stalking from coworker to coworker on paycheck Fridays making sure that your take-home and rate of salary increase is within some statistically insignificant range until you get to a point where the difference, accrued over a long time would really slap you in the face.

I think it would be fabulous if employers were forced to, upfront, show salaries for each employee upon demand when a prospective employee was given a figure for his/her salary, but this isn't happening and it won't ever. Don't feed me any of this "learn to be a better negotiator" horseshit either. This ruling expects people either to be fucking rude upfront to employers and demand to know salaries across the board (hurting their chances for employment) or to do it later to their coworkers (which is terrific for the bosses as they don't have to be the ones bothered).

Fuck, man. I was all set to squall some about this thing that I read on newredshoes' journal, and I went to the NYT and now I'm even more pissed off. Too mad to write more about this because I won't be coherent. Just grrrrrrrr man.

Comments

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

It has to be conservatives defending those mean, evil, discriminatory corporations! It couldn't be that they're just reading the law Congress wrote!

Title VII has a 180 day statute of limitations written into it. The question for the court was whether each paycheck reflecting the discriminatory condition restarts the clock on the statute of limitations. If it did, the statute of limitations would be meaningless. It's nothing more than a statutory interpretation question. But you couldn't get that from the NYTimes article; you'd have to have read the decision and know something about administrative law.

This is why I hate mainstream press articles on Supreme Court cases in fields other than Con Law. The NYT doesn't know how to depart from their "Law is a dispute between political parties!" line to look at questions of law. Alito made the right decision, and the subtext is the same as for a lot of the "right-wing" Supreme Court decisions: If you have a problem, go take it up with Congress. Don't expect us to expand the statute just because we feel it's more just in the present case.

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

If it did, the statute of limitations would be meaningless.

Well, not completely meaningless. I would think 180 days from when you stopped getting paychecks (ie, left the company) would be a perfectly reasonable statute of limitations.

It also seems inconsistant (not that this ever stops anyone) with respect to other laws. In what other instances does the clock for the statute of limitations start ticking at the first incident and can never be reset?

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

Well, not completely meaningless. I would think 180 days from when you stopped getting paychecks (ie, left the company) would be a perfectly reasonable statute of limitations.

But close. If you don't leave the company, you can file until 180 days after you quit? That's a bizarre reading of a statute of limitations that just says "180 days after the incident". That would be a pretty severe twisting of the law's language to make the "right" policy.

It also seems inconsistant (not that this ever stops anyone) with respect to other laws. In what other instances does the clock for the statute of limitations start ticking at the first incident and can never be reset?

Well...all of them. If you get a raise that's first applied to your paycheck Jan. 1, you don't say, "I got a raise Jan. 1, and again Jan. 15, and again Feb. 1, and again..." A change in salary is a one time event, and that's when the clock starts. The interpretation Ginsburg wanted is akin to saying, in a robbery case, "The statute of limitations doesn't start until after the robber gives you your money back, because the robbery still hurts." A single incident starts the clock, not continued injury stemming from the single incident.

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

That's not quite what I meant: Say, for instance, someone steals your credit card number and starts charging things. They steal the card and buy a big-screen tv on Monday. They buy a PS3 on Wednesday. You notice and cancel the card Wednesday night. Does the clock start on Monday or Wednesday? (Or is that two seperate clocks, and you have to deal with them as two seperate instances in all legal procedings?)

It sounds to me that what Ginsberg was going for was less "after the robber gives you your money back" and more "the robber is taking money from you twice a month."

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I waited to comment until this one because, as usual, chuckro is more elegant with his phrasing than me.

This sums it up perfectly:
It sounds to me that what Ginsberg was going for was less "after the robber gives you your money back" and more "the robber is taking money from you twice a month."

I did, for the record, understand just fine that SCOTUS decided on the 180 day limitation of the law from the article in The New York Times. I just happen to think it's a shit ruling that, using chuckro's analogy shows how much it steals from people with legit grievances. Each time your raise is smaller for the same work (or, in the case being decided, smaller than that earned by the lowes paid employee at any level in the company), the company employing you is stealing from you and your labor. A raise affects your annual salary, but unless you take that upfront and never take another dime for the rest of the year, it is put into effect by changing the amount on each of your paychecks. That's 26 checks a year where you are being lowballed, and each one should be actionable.

As I said, payment discrimination is something that is systemic and often only discovered many years after the fact. If that's true, by this law, there's nothing you can do about it no matter what the SCOTUS decision says. However, if you're still employed at the company and you discover intentional or unintentional (subconscious discrimination is possible to my mind) pay discrimination, you should be able to act on it--or use the threat of a lawsuit--to obtain what your labor is justly worth.

As for this comment in your first reply:
It has to be conservatives defending those mean, evil, discriminatory corporations! It couldn't be that they're just reading the law Congress wrote!

Look at who was in the majority for this assinine decision. You have Kennedy, Scalia, and Thomas--noted conservatives when it comes to rulings in SCOTUS--and Alito and Roberts, new guys already making a name for themselves as such. They chose to see the 180 day limitation imposed by Congress in the law as something that can only benefit the employer and hurt the employed. Given that Alito and Roberts owe their seats to a president who is clearly living on the cloud of "Nothing big business ever does can be wrong! Wheee!" I think it's not unfair to call a spade a spade.

[moonlightalice.livejournal.com]

The question for the court was whether each paycheck reflecting the discriminatory condition restarts the clock on the statute of limitations.

Did you read Ginsberg's dissent? The problem with pay discrimination is that salaries are often highly secretive (usually by a matter of strict policy), so the realities of that discrimination often only surface much later. Worse, she argues correctly that pay discrimination is not a one-time event, as you say. It feeds on itself. The less you make in the present the less you'll make in the future because future pay raises are based on past salaries, not based on a common benchmark. By the end of all this the woman was getting paid FORTY PERCENT LESS than her colleagues. The truth is that this kind of thing is continuous, it's secretive, and it's persistent. There is no "clock" on something that affects your entire career path, long after the initial decision was made.

This is why I hate mainstream press articles on Supreme Court cases in fields other than Con Law. The NYT doesn't know how to depart from their "Law is a dispute between political parties!" line to look at questions of law. Alito made the right decision, and the subtext is the same as for a lot of the "right-wing" Supreme Court decisions: If you have a problem, go take it up with Congress. Don't expect us to expand the statute just because we feel it's more just in the present case.

Did we read the same article? I didn't see a single mention of "political party," "Republican," "Democrat," "liberal," or "conservative." First of all, political parties fundamentally go back to the basic principle of how one interprets the constitution. This has evolved significantly, but it's exactly what the justices are doing here. People who conservatively interpret it, like the strict 180 days, or people who interpret it more loosely, like Ginsberg's rationale of the particularly damaging and insidious way that pay discrimination works. So is law a dispute between political parties? Absolutely and fundamentally.

[wellgull.livejournal.com]

Pretty much everybody defends the evil, mean, discriminatory corporations (er, sorry, redundancy in cited original). The Dems are just as much in their pocket as the Reps. They just sometimes feel worse about it.

Perhaps the Ginsberg interpretation would make the statute of limitations meaningless, but the majority interpretation renders the law as a whole meaningless. The Supreme Court is supposed to be grown-up enough to recognize and respond appropriately in that kind of situation.

Meanwhile, the effects of the injury done by the discrimination can continue even after your employment with a disciminatory employer is over: salary history often plays a large role in future salary negotiations, such that a discriminatorily low pay rate ccould, under the right circumstances, follow you from one job to the next.

[deltagrl.livejournal.com]

arg. that doth suck'st.