WaPo: “Lilly Ledbetter never stopped fighting, never kicked back on her porch in Alabama, sipped a glass of sweet tea and savored her victory….
But when she died on Saturday at 86 of respiratory failure, the wage gap she spent decades trying to close remained.
…
She was paid less than the lowest-paid male newbie at the plant.
So she sued Goodyear in an Alabama court and the jury was totally on her side, awarding her $3.8 million. That was later dropped to $360,000 including back pay, but she never saw a dime.
The tire giant took the case to the Supreme Court on a technicality.
She hadn’t complained about the inequity within the 180-day deadline required under the Equal Pay Act of 1963, the law that was supposed to fix all this more than 60 years ago.
In a narrow 5-4 decision in 2007, the Supreme Court sided with the tire company in the case that ended with one of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s most scathing dissents, accusing the eight male justices on the court of being ignorant of the nation’s wage gap.
“The court does not comprehend or is indifferent to the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination,” she said, and then asked Congress to pick up the slack.”