Pete Stark: “I rise in strong support of pay equity. The Supreme Court's ruling in Ledbetter v. Goodyear was absurd. If I broke the…”

“I rise in strong support of pay equity. The Supreme Court's ruling in Ledbetter v. Goodyear was absurd. If I broke the law for nearly two decades--as the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company did when they stiffed Lilly Ledbetter out of the pay she deserved for 19 years--I couldn't turn around and say that I didn't owe anything because no one caught me during the first 6 months. Yet that's exactly what the Supreme Court allowed Goodyear to say to Ms. Ledbetter. The existing law is unfair. Many workers don't even discover that they're being discriminated against until the existing 180-day statute of limitations has passed. In every other area of American tort law, the clock restarts with every new violation. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act simply fixes existing law so that sex discrimination is treated the same way. My Republican colleagues love to call up the ``frivolous lawsuits'' bogeyman to scare hard-working Americans out of their rights, but there's nothing frivolous about equality and justice. The wage gap in the United States has remained stagnant over the last 7 years. Women in the United States still make less than 78 cents for every dollar a man makes. Women of color have it even worse: African-American women earn only 68.7 cents and Latin American women 59 cents for every dollar an American man makes.”