Five Minutes With
Lilly Ledbetter
Lilly Ledbetter speaks in the State Dining Room of the White House after President Barack Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.
(AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
Lilly Ledbetter never intended to be a political activist. But in 1998, just shortly before her retirement, Ledbetter received unsettling news. An anonymous co-worker at the Goodyear Tire factory where she had worked for nearly two decades slipped her a note detailing that she was being paid thousands less than her male counterparts. Her protest against the pay discrepancy ultimately led to a 5-4 Supreme Court decision that ruled Ledbetter was not entitled to the $300,000 in back pay a lower court awarded her. The reason, the Supreme Court said, was because she had filed her complaint more than 180 days after the first discriminatory pay decision was made, one that was made years before she even knew about the discrimination. The Supreme Court ruling transformed Ledbetter into a full-fledged advocate. Her hard work came to fruition when President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law on January 29—the first piece of legislation approved by the new president. With the law’s enactment, workers are now entitled to sue employers up to 180 days after each discriminatory paycheck. Ledbetter is unlikely to ever receive the thousands of dollars of back pay—she told Time Magazine that she lives “paycheck to paycheck”—but she is grateful that other women will be protected by the new law.
Today, Ledbetter is lobbying on behalf of the Paycheck Fairness Act, a bill designed to strengthen the Equal Pay Act of 1963, which makes it illegal for employers to pay unequal wages to men and women who perform equal work. Campus Progress spoke with Ledbetter for Women’s History Month about her courageous political battle and how young women can ensure their workplace rights are upheld.
Your struggle to achieve the proper compensation for your work at Goodyear took more than 10 years. After such a long fight, at age 70, what does this victory mean to you and all American women?
Well the victory for me means that everybody along the way has agreed that I was correct and that the Supreme Court got it wrong. But we have to give Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg credit for reading her dissent word for word in the ruling when the verdict came out because she hit the nail on the head. She had everything right. Everything that Justice Ginsburg said was so how I felt and how I had been treated and not only me but millions of millions of women and minorities across the United States that have been treated the same way.
What was going through your head as you watched President Obama sign the Fair Pay Act into law?
How grateful I was that I had finally reached that point after so many hours of work and so many hours of lobbying for the bill and the contacts that I had made that it had all finally come to the finalization. And actually too, how proud I am for the American women and minorities because this will I think, I hope it does anyway, encourage corporations and companies to assess their pay records and their procedures and to correct any shortcomings that they may have. Cases like mine should never be.
It took you 20 years to discover that Goodyear was paying you far less than your male counterparts. How was Goodyear able to hide the pay difference from you for so many years?
Because when you’re hired in at Goodyear you were given instructions that you never discuss your pay or if you do, you won’t work here. So no one ever stood around talking about their pay. We had no way of knowing. I believed that I was working for a very well-run corporation. We had a lot of government contracts and I thought that if you had government contracts you had adhere to all federal guidelines.
What steps can young women take to ensure they are well informed about their rights in the workplace?
Well they need to know all they can about their employers. It’s always good if a person can have a mentor within the work environment, especially when they first hire in to help guide them and maybe they can give them some instructions. The main thing is to know who you’re working for and as I tell the young people today, the first day of employment your retirement starts because all of your social security, usually your company’s retirement plans, they are all based on what you’re earning. So it’s very important to know and research your corporation and to know exactly what they have to offer. And make sure you’re getting that.
Many women know that they are being discriminated against but fear speaking out because they are worried about the repercussions they might face from angry coworkers or management. Can you off these women any advice?
They have to weigh the pros and cons of speaking out. But now when they are short changed in their employment, in their money, it just builds and builds and once you get behind you never can catch up. They say that there’s an example now when two people go to work, a man and a women right out of college, and the man makes $1,000 more per month than the women, if they’re like a government employee and they get the raises according to the way they’re given, when they retire the man will have $1 million more than the woman. Now that’s why it is so critical. This is something that people cannot continue to stick their heads in the sand and ignore. People do have to start standing up, because that’s why we have not gotten any farther.
Now that the Fair Pay Act has been signed into law, how will you continue to work to ensure gender equality in the workplace?
I am committed. I left the White House the day my bill was signed and am now moving on to the Paycheck Fairness [Act]. There are several other bills pending in the Senate today, that will come up later and I will be on board with them because it is high time that minorities are treated more fairly. My opportunity is gone and I’ll be treated like a second class citizen in my retirement for the rest of my life. There’s nothing I can do about it. But if I can make a difference and the fights worth fighting and its one that I feel like the people today, the women and the minorities must win for their families. Because so many, many women are supporting their entire families; they’re supporting handicapped husbands, children, they’re supporting [their] children. Because they’re poor, it is critical that they be paid more than 78 cents for every dollar a man makes.
There is a tendency among some groups of people to insist that our society is no longer sexist. How can we get the message out that gender discrimination still exists and that it is an issue worth fighting for?
I believe that [young people] are well educated today. They need to be smart and they need to be smart about what’s affecting their lives and when they go into employment it’s not just a temporary thing, it’s something they’ll do for the rest of their lives. I have been amazed at how many men have jumped on board with the campaign that I have campaigned for, with the equal pay for equal work because it affects whole families. This is a family affair, because it takes everybody. It’s also a snowball affair. If these families earn and are paid according to what they should be it will trickle down into the communities. It gives us better students, better schools, [and] better livelihoods across the United States.
Sarah Karlin is an Editorial Intern at Campus Progress and a senior at George Washington University.
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