Former EEOC Chair Norton to File Bill to Save Pay Remedy (5/30/07)

Former EEOC Chair Norton to File Bill to
Save Pay Remedy in Basic Job Bias Legislation Following Supreme Court Decision
May 30, 2007

Washington, DC--Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC), a former chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, today said that when Congress returns she will introduce legislation to correct yesterday's "egregious and destructive Supreme Court pay discrimination decision in a case brought by the first female supervisor at a Goodyear Tire plant in Godson, Alabama." Norton said that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissent and call for corrective legislation is "nothing short of a mandate to save the equal pay remedy for women and men under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act." The Court's ruling would give claimants only 180 days to discover and file pay discrimination claims. Employers almost never reveal pay levels of actual employees, even without names and some even prohibit such sharing among employees (a prohibition Norton would eliminate in a related bill). Norton said, "The decision would require quick legal action by claimants that is impossible in a pay case because such employee disparities cannot be shown without investigation into mostly secretive information, such suspicions develop over time and certainly not spontaneously." Norton agrees with employers that they cannot fairly be charged with many years of discoverable discrimination, but that working with recognized legal concepts of "continuing violations," reasonable time frames can be developed, particularly when employees know or should have known of pay levels based on race or sex or when such pay levels have been deliberately set based on such discriminatory criteria.

Norton is a co-sponsor of a bill that already has had a Committee on Education and Labor hearing to update the Equal Pay Act. However, this case was brought under the much broader and more widely used Title VII statute allowing claims not only for pay discrimination but for all forms of job discrimination and working conditions.